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The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the impact of credit supply on sales growth among small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The three-stage least square (3SLS) method was used to analyse a cross-sectional panel data set covering 13,548 Swedish SMEs across four industry sectors from 2009 to 2012.

The study provides empirical evidence that trade credit in terms of accounts receivable significantly and positively affects sales growth, indicating that SMEs investing more in accounts receivable are more likely to achieve growth. Furthermore, lagged sales growth and firm size are positively, while firm age is negatively, related to growth.

Managers can increase firm growth by efficiently managing the supply of credit to their customers, especially liquidity-constrained firms, thereby increasing sales growth.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this is one of the first empirical studies of the impact of credit supply in terms of accounts receivable on sales growth. The study applies the 3SLS method to a comprehensive cross-sectoral sample.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of firm-, industry- and country-level determinants on real annual sales growth in the context of a cross-classified multilevel perspective.

The authors studied 11,381 firms from 17 industries in six Latin American countries based on the data collected up to 2015. Since the data are nested in two levels (level 1: firms; level 2: cross-classification of industries and countries), the authors use a cross-classified multilevel model. The significant variability in all levels of analysis confirms the option for the multilevel model.

Differences in industries account for the largest proportion of variance (77.2 percent). This finding indicates that industry-level characteristics should be explored in the sales growth literature (it seems to the authors that they were neglected). This finding also calls attention to the roles of policy-makers in facilitating firm growth. The final model indicates that the considered variables explain approximately 55 percent of the differences in real annual sales growth in the same industry and country after having accounted for the impacts of the differences in firms. After accounting for the impacts of the differences in firms’ and countries’ characteristics, 43 percent of the variation in average real annual sales growth is due to differences in industries. The obtained results indicate that while firms from countries with higher GDP growth and more effective corporate boards present higher real annual sales growth, firms that operate in commodity producer industries have worse performance in this indicator. With respect to firm’s characteristics, larger firms (contradicting Gibrat’s law) and exporters grew less. Some results could be explained by the decrease in commodities’ prices and global purchases between 2012 and 2015.

The paper fills some gaps in the firm growth literature by testing Gibrat’s law in non-developed countries (not yet done, to the best of the authors’ knowledge) and exploring variables other than size in the explanation of firm growth (rarely used, to the best of the authors’ knowledge). Moreover, the adopted model correctly estimated the origin of the variability in firm growth in its natural cross-classified distinct levels.

In this research, we examine the impact of ISO 14001, an international environmental management accreditation, on the long-term financial risk and sales growth of firms.

We employ a quasi-experimental design and construct 682 treated and control firms that are matched using propensity score matching. We then test our hypotheses using the difference in difference model.

We find that, although ISO 14001 leads to lower financial risk, standard management systems such as ISO 14001 actually hinder the sales growth of firms, an unanticipated outcome. In particular, this trade-off worsens over time, becoming particularly more severe among firms that adopt ISO 14001 early and operate in less-polluting industries.

We present a hidden side of environmental accreditations, indicating a potential trade-off in the long-term efficacy of environmental standard management systems.

Firms must be cautious about adopting environmental management systems. Over time, a focus on environmental certification could potentially hinder firms' long-term growth. Firms should also be aware of certification timing and levels of industry pollution to resolve the tension in the trade-off.

This research is one of the first studies demonstrating that environmental accreditations result in a trade-off between reducing financial risk and improving sales growth.

The paper discusses how market orientation impacts marketing performance in the hotel industry of Ghana. The research was a qualitative research that covered a sample of nineteen19 hotels in Ghana by using a two-stage nonprobability sampling comprising convenience sampling and purposive sampling. Personal interviews were conducted to collect primary and qualitative data from hotel managers of the sampled hotels. Template analysis was used to analyze the data in order to understand how market orientation impacts selected marketing performance indicators. The study has provided insight into how market orientation impacts marketing performance indicators, precisely sales growth, customer complaints, customer satisfaction, and customer retention. The limitations of the study are that it is a cross-sectional study and it involved only officials of the hotels as participants. Also, the study does not explain how customers perceive market orientation practices and how market orientation affects customer buying behavior. Research implications are that longitudinal research design and involvement of customers as participants should be considered in future-related qualitative studies. The contribution of this study to knowledge is that it has given some explanations to how market orientation impacts sales growth, customer complaints, customer satisfaction, and customer retention in the hotel business.

Previous studies primarily focus on how to achieve better performance in the international markets, but few centers on whether internationalization is a promising strategy for new ventures’ growth and development. Based on two pioneering frameworks Conservative, Predictable, and Pacemaker (CPP) model and the 7-P model, this paper fills this gap by analyzing how exporting exert heterogeneous effects on two types of growth, sales growth and employment growth. Accordingly, this paper aims to favor market-oriented new ventures to make a strategy on expanding international markets.

This study is based on firm-level data from the Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database. The year 2005 was used as the shock year. By conducting the propensity score matching method, 793 couples of matched new ventures were collected with sales growth and 686 couples with employment growth. The difference-in-differences method was applied to analyze the various influences that exporting has on new ventures’ sales growth and employment growth.

The main finding of this paper is that new ventures that exported can achieve better sales growth than their counterparts that only operated domestically, whereas new ventures that remain in the domestic market have no difference in employment growth from those that exported.

This study shows that exporting is especially beneficial for market-seeking new ventures. Because the study is based on Chinese data, scholars of international business can conduct further research on other countries with different economic structures.

Theoretically, this paper contributes to both international business theory and entrepreneurship theory by combining the CPP model and the 7-P model. Practically, this paper shows that exports mainly benefit the sales growth of new ventures. This suggests that business practitioners should consider their growth goals before they choose to enter the global market.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of the effects of advertising based on economic cycles. To comprehend advertising effects in the restaurant industry from an economic cycle perspective, this study investigated both short- and long-run advertising effects under periods of economic contraction and expansion and compared those effects between the two economic periods.

The data were collected from the COMPUSTAT database for the restaurant industry (SIC 5,812) from 1979 to 2010. To estimate the economic cycles, the 2005 year-based real gross domestic product (GDP) was used from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Also, all variables were depreciated by the value of the US dollar in 2005. For estimation, a single equation error correction model was used to examine the short-term and long-term effects of advertising.

The results of this study indicated that both the short- and long-term effects of advertising on sales growth were more obvious in contraction periods than in expansion periods. However, the short-run effects of advertising on brand equity did not significantly differ between expansion and contraction periods. Further, the long-term effects of advertising on brand equity were greater in expansion periods than in contraction periods. The findings suggest that restaurant firms should not reduce their advertising budgets during periods of economic contraction to take advantage of superior sales growth outcomes during these periods.

The results of this study provide restaurant managers with useful practical implications. During economic contraction periods, restaurant managers should not reduce advertising budgets to take an ascendant position in terms of sales growth. Though the net positive effect at year t + 1 of contraction periods was smaller than that of expansion periods for sales growth, this is temporal and the long-run positive effect on sales growth spreads into future periods. Thus, a counter-cyclical advertising strategy could compensate for reduced sales from weak customer demands during economic contraction periods.

There have been many empirical studies on the advertising effect in the literature. However, this study examined whether the effects of advertising differ between economic expansion and contraction periods. This specificity is helpful for industrial practitioners as well as academic researchers.

In the macroeconomic environment of the Iberian Peninsula, this paper aims to understand which factors, intrinsic to management, affect the performance of wine companies.

The sample comprises 3,113 wine Iberian companies between 2011 and 2018. This study has used the panel data methodology, specifically the generalized method of moments system estimation method of Arellano and Bond (1991); Arellano and Bover (1995); and Blundell and Bond (1998) to test the hypotheses proposed.

Using return on assets (ROA) and sales growth as measures of corporate performance, this study’s results suggest that sales growth is the variable that has the most significant determining factors, both specific to the company and given the macroeconomic environment. Investors and civil society well understand the meaning of sales growth, namely, in a sector close to the final consumer. When using ROA as a dependent variable, the results suggest that because it is a pure management variable, the manager tends to be more concerned with maintaining adequate levels of economic profitability to ensure sustainability and future solvency, without giving prominence to the macroeconomic environment.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that a study has been carried out in the Iberian Peninsula on the wine industry using ROA and sales growth as measures of corporate performance. This study shows that sales growth is a measure traditionally known to external stakeholders, and to that extent, its determining factors are the variables that these players most value in the market.

This study aims to provide an exploratory analysis of a broad range of factors that may help to explain the rapid growth of Chinese private owned enterprises (POEs).

The analysis in this study takes advantage of an archival dataset constructed by the third author from proprietary data collected for a practitioner conference in China.

Consistent with research on entrepreneurs in Western economies, the individual characteristics of the Chinese founders showed weak correlations with sales growth, but measures of founder motivation did correlate with sales growth. While the results for company characteristics were also weak, most of the factors related to company governance, strategy, competitive advantage, and stakeholder trust all showed significant correlations with the POE's rates of sales growth.

The motivations of Chinese founders appear to matter more than their traits in explaining their ability to grow sales. Solid structure, strategy, and competitive advantages are important also. Building trust with stakeholders may facilitate growth by helping Chinese POEs bridge the institutional voids that they face.

The rapid growth of the Chinese economy and of Chinese POEs offers a unique content in which to study factors that may affect growth rates. However, obtaining reliable data on Chinese POEs is difficult; this study uses a proprietary dataset to offer a rare glimpse into the factors that may affect the sales growth rates of Chinese POEs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether deferred revenue changes can serve as a leading indicator for firms listed on China’s stock markets, and whether China’s market participants can appropriately incorporate future performance implications of deferred revenue changes.

Empirical/archival/regression analysis.

The authors find that deferred revenue changes are positively associated with the next two years’ sales growth, gross profit margin, profit margin, and return on assets, suggesting that deferred revenue changes can serve as a valid leading indicator for future financial performance. The authors also find that Chinese investors tend to underweight future performance implications of deferred revenue changes.

To the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first research to examine deferred revenue changes as a leading fundamental indicator and market underreaction to reported accounting information for firms listed on China’s stock markets.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether B corps’ (for-profit entities whose owners voluntarily commit to conduct business in a socially responsible manner, beyond traditional CSR, that generates profits, but not at the expense of stakeholders) commitment to social issues influences two aspects of financial performance: employee productivity and sales growth.

This paper is an exploratory analysis of B corps. This paper examines B corps with B Lab’s B Impact Assessment reports and PrivCo financial data, for descriptive information. This paper also analyzes the financial impact of obtaining and reporting on excellence in both employee and consumer focus, as well as the differences in financial growth between B corps and non-hybrid peers.

Overall, results suggest that, among B corps whose treatment of employees (consumers) is recognized as an “area of excellence,” employee productivity (sales growth) is significantly higher. Additionally, sales growth is significantly higher for B corps relative to their peer, non-hybrid, matched firms.

Results from this study inform states considering the adoption of the B corp legal status – this legal status does not hinder firm profitability, but instead enhances long-term firm value while allowing firms to beneficially affect their communities, consumers, employees and the environment.

Results from this study provide important insights regarding the current paradigm shift from the traditional business focus on profit maximization to a fruitful coexistence of profits with social interests and initiatives, within a structure of dissolving national boundaries and increasingly divergent logics.

This paper provides an initial empirical examination of B corp performance.