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In explaining ethno-territorial conflicts, leadership preferences have an odd status. In case studies, leadership preferences are often viewed as highly significant causes but are not usually defined and measured explicitly. In large-sample statistical studies, leadership preferences are only captured by weakly related proxy variables. This paper aims to fill this gap by developing suitable theory, which can be used consistently in both case study and statistical applications.

Formal bargaining models are used to examine the expected impact of variation in leadership preferences. Relevant leadership characteristics are then used to construct measures of variation in leadership preferences, which are applied in case studies.

In bargaining models, variation in leadership preferences is expected to have a significant impact on ethno-territorial conflict outcomes. More extreme nationalist leaders and, more conditionally, strongly power-seeking leaders, should be more likely to be willing to use force to modify the status quo – although more moderate nationalist leaderships are also willing to do so under certain conditions. In five case studies, these formally derived hypotheses receive initial empirical support.

Theoretically and empirically, further refinement of research on variation in leadership preferences promises to add significant value. Formally, it is worth investigating the expected impact of additional preference types. Empirically, it is important to invest in measures of leadership preferences across large samples.

Drawing on population ecology and net political theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of representative institutions (net political benefits (NPB)) on the success rates of privatization adopted by state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) and their learning curve during the process.

The author focuses on the privatization of SOEs listed in China and employs the social network with event‐history analysis (survival analysis).

The results demonstrate that the determinants of NPB increase the success rates of privatization, while SOEs learn from two perspectives: private firms and other privatizing SOEs within the same population. In particular, I suggest that the outdegree market location network centrality before privatization, as well as the indegree centrality after privatization, both positively moderate the relationship between learning processes and the success rate of SOEs' privatization.

More precisely, institutions are factors that not only determine the choice of SOEs to privatization, but also the success of this strategy. The finding will encourage government administrations, both central and local, to promote the development of institutions in order to facilitate market transactions. Implications for firms might be the learning mechanisms discovered in this research. When firms adopted the strategy of privatization, they could choose two sources of learning: private firms within the same industry and others who were implementing the same strategy.

The contribution of the paper is, its synthesis of institutional and ecological perspectives and research on privatization in emerging markets and organization learning in networking. Theoretically, the author extends the privatization literature into a worldly context with a combination of institution and organization learning theory. Empirically, with the application of network perspective and survival analysis, the author uncovered and carefully examined the learning mechanism in the process of privatization.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how foreign and domestic investors differ in their beliefs about the relative merits of a firm's political connections.

These differences are employed to explain cross-sectional variation in the previously documented premium in A-share prices relative to otherwise equivalent foreign currency denominated B-shares for Chinese firms.

Chinese domestic individual investors were excluded from owning B-shares of Chinese firms prior to February 20, 2001. The authors find that firms with more political connections have higher premiums and a smaller reduction in premiums associated with this event.

This is consistent with domestic block holders deriving additional benefits from politically connected firms.

The findings also have important policy implications by showing that government can have a strong effect on the economy even without applying macro-policy tools.

Government ownership in listed companies can result in discrepancies among classes of investors with respect to their valuations. Furthermore, the prohibition of short sales prevents arbitrage from correcting this bias, and eventually the role of the market in allocating resources efficiently is undermined.

The authors investigate the role of political connections as implied by the proportion of state ownership in explaining the A-share premium. Unlike previous studies that associate state ownership with political risk, the paper relates state ownership to political connections that are particularly beneficial to domestic large block shareholders. This interpretation is consistent with the findings and with previous literature on state ownership and political connections of Chinese firms.

Effective land use management in lesser developed countries is problematic due to a variety of factors including inexperience and turnover of decision makers, lack of communication among experts in functional areas, and scattered or missing data needed by managers to make informed decisions. This paper describes a “first step” approach toward the solution of these problems that was implemented in the Dominican Republic. The paper introduces a framework used to organize and facilitate the sharing of data needed for land use decision across multiple disciplines. The framework provided the basis for the development of a prototype agricultural geographic decision support system for use in the Dominican Republic. This system is unique in that it combines concepts from semantic data modeling and database design, geographic information systems, and knowledge‐based systems.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that entrepreneurs are motivated not only by the desire to maximize profits but also by the desire for mastery. It then attempts to analyze the implications of mastery seeking for the economics and politics of government privileges and favors for businesses.

Using the existing psychological literature on mastery as motivation the paper first attempts to conceptualize how the desire for mastery manifests itself in the context of entrepreneurship. Next, it attempts to clarify the implications of this for the existing literature on the effects of government policies promoting cronyism.

The paper argues that in business mastery involves producing a good product or service, and validation of the performance occurs via the choices of sovereign consumers. Mastery is thus achieved through participation in a process of competition that is free from government favors. Given that crony polices can disrupt the consumer choice process and consequently the validation of performance, they can therefore affect the types of individuals who become entrepreneurs, with a high level of government intervention pushing success seekers to pursue mastery in other life endeavors, with adverse implications for innovation and growth in the economy.

The exploration of implications of a plausible but underexplored motive for entrepreneurs and the interaction between this motive and the effects of various policies fostering cronyism or rent seeking are potential contributions of the paper.

The purpose of this paper is to review a synthesis of theories and empirical studies dealing with the adoption of and compliance with IFRS in developing countries in an attempt to provide directions for future research.

The review focusses on four main streams including: first, the motives for IFRS adoption; second, corporate characteristics and the degree of compliance with IFRS; third, the economic consequences of IFRS adoption and finally; fourth, the use of regulation as an enforcement mechanism to monitor compliance with IFRS. The authors review empirical studies specifically devoted to developing countries.

Regarding the first stream relating to IFRS adoption, the macroeconomic decision of adopting IFRS in developing countries can be justified by two main theories which are: the economic theory of network (Katz and Shapiro, 1985) and isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991), however, empirical evidence in developing countries to confirm these theories is limited. Regarding the second stream relating to corporate characteristics and the degree of compliance with IFRS, the authors find that the results are mixed. Regarding the third stream relating to the economic consequences of IFRS adoption, it seems that the evidence is still limited in developing countries especially with respect to the impact of IFRS adoption on foreign direct investment, cost of equity capital and earnings management. Regarding the fourth and final stream in relation to regulation, enforcement and compliance with IFRS, the authors find that research is very limited. It was evidenced in the very few research studies conducted, that global disclosure standards are optimal only if compliance is monitored and enforced by efficient institutions.

The author’s study attempts to provide a foundational knowledge resource that will inform practitioners, researchers and regulators in developing countries about the relevance of the different theories that exist in the accounting literature to explain the adoption of and compliance with IFRS.

Compared to developed countries, the four streams outlined remain under-researched in developing countries. Therefore, researchers should examine these topics in developing countries to inform practitioners, regulators and the capital market about the effects of adopting IFRS and their relevance to developing countries. In addition, researchers should embark on identifying new theories to explain the adoption of and compliance with IFRS in developing countries that take into consideration the socioeconomic culture of these settings.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

This paper aims to investigate the effects of political skill in a specific workplace setting – the job negotiation. The authors expected negotiator political skill to be positively related to distributive negotiation outcome, problem-solving as a negotiation strategy to mediate this relationship and political skill to also moderate – that is amplify – the link between problem-solving and negotiation outcome.

In Study 1, a laboratory-based negotiation simulation was conducted with 88 participants; the authors obtained self-reports of political skill prior to the negotiation and – to account for non-independence of negotiating partners’ outcome – used the Actor–Partner Interdependence Model for data analysis. Study 2 was carried out as a real-life negotiation study with 100 managers of a multinational corporation who were given the opportunity to re-negotiate their salary package prior to a longer-term foreign assignment. Here, the authors drew on two objective measures of negotiation success, increase of annual gross salary and additional annual net benefits.

In Study 1, the initial hypothesis – political skill will be positively related to negotiator success – was fully supported. In Study 2, all three hypotheses (see above) were fully supported for additional annual net benefits and partly supported for increase of annual gross salary.

To the authors' best knowledge, this paper presents the first study to examine political skill as a focal predictor variable in the negotiation context. Furthermore, the studies also broaden the emotion-centered approach to social effectiveness that is prevalent in current negotiation research.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.