A Firm Perspective of Anti-dumping and Countervailing Duty Cases in the United States

The role played by firms in the prosecution of anti-dumping and countervailing duty cases in the United States is understudied. This article provides greater understanding of the challenges faced by firms during the process of prosecuting anti-dumping and countervailing duty cases in the United States. This is achieved by applying a theoretical model of corporate political activity to data collected through interviews with 24 trade attorneys in Washington, D.C., practising in the area of antidumping and countervailing duty law. Anti-dumping and countervailing duty cases are found to require significant resource commitments from firms in the participating industries, as well as requiring individual firms to make a number of strategic decisions. The value of an affirmative decision and imposition of duties to the domestic and foreign industry is found to be more nuanced than previous studies have suggested. Non-duty effects of AD and CVD cases are also confirmed. Finally a clearer understanding of the role of individual firms in anti-dumping and countervailing duty cases is shown to have the potential to improve how industry influence is taken account of in future research.

Music, Magic, and the Mythic: The Dynamics of Visual and Aural Discourse in Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen

The 1980s saw a wave of African films that aimed to represent, on both local and international screens, a sophisticated pre-colonial Africa, thus debunking notions of the continent as primitive. Toward this aim the films inscribed the conventions of oral performance within their visual styles, denying spectator identification with the protagonists and emphasising the presence of the narrator. However, some critics argued that these films exoticised Africa, while their use of oral performance’s distancing effect echoed the ‘scientific’ distance structured by the ethnographic film, in which African societies were represented as ‘the other’. Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen exemplifies this tension, transposing into cinematic form oral storytelling techniques in the depiction of a power struggle within the covert cult of the komo, a Bambara initiation society unfamiliar to most non-Bambara viewers. This paper demonstrates how the film negotiates this tension via music, which interpellates the international spectator by eliciting a greater identification with the protagonists than that determined at a visual level, while encoding a verisimilitude to rituals that may otherwise be read as the superstitious practices of ‘the other’. In this way, music and image in Yeelen operate as parallel, though often overlapping, discourses, bridging the gap between the film’s culturally specific narrative and formal components, and its international spectators.

Technological regimes, Schumpeterian patterns of innovation and firm-level productivity growth

The article investigates the relationships between technological regimes and firm-level productivity performance, and it explores how such a relationship differs in different Schumpeterian patterns of innovation. The analysis makes use of a rich dataset containing data on innovation and other economic characteristics of a large representative sample of Norwegian firms in manufacturing and service industries for the period 1998–2004. First, we decompose TFP growth into technical progress and efficiency changes by means of data envelopment analysis. We then estimate an empirical model that relates these two productivity components to the characteristics of technological regimes and a set of other firm-specific factors. The results indicate that: (i) TFP growth has mainly been achieved through technical progress, while technical efficiency has on average decreased; (ii) the characteristics of technological regimes are important determinants of firm-level productivity growth, but their impacts on technical progress are different from the effects on efficiency change; (iii) the estimated model works differently in the two Schumpeterian regimes. Technical progress has been more dynamic in Schumpeter Mark II industries, while efficiency change has been more important in Schumpeter Mark I markets.

Resource access needs and capabilities as mediators of the relationship between VC firm size and syndication

Drawing from the resource-based view and transaction costs economics, we develop a theoretical framework to explain why small and large firms face different levels of resource access needs and resource access capabilities, which mediate the relationship between firm size and hybrid governance. Employing a sample of 317 venture capital firms, drawn across six European countries, we empirically assess our framework in the context of venture capital syndication. We estimate a path model using structural equation modeling and find, consistent with our theoretical framework, mediating effects of different types of resource access needs and resource access capabilities between VC firm size and syndication frequency. These findings advance the small business literature by highlighting the trade-offs that size imposes on firms that seek to manage their access to external resources through hybrid governance strategies.

Customs-Related Transaction Costs, Firm Size and International Trade Intensity

Customs are generally perceived as a time-consuming impediment to international trade. However, few studies have empirically examined the determinants and the impact of this type of government-imposed transaction costs. This paper analyses the role of firm size as a determinant of customs-related transaction costs, as well as the effect of firm size on the relationship between these costs and the international trade intensity of firms. The results of this study indicate that customs-related transaction costs repress international trade activities of firms, even at low levels of these costs. The paper identifies transaction-related economies of scale, simplified customs procedures and advanced information and communication technology as main determinants of customs-related transaction costs. It is shown that when these factors are taken into account, firm size has no effect on customs-related transaction costs. Policy implications are considered for firm strategy and public policy.

Firm Size and Export Intensity: Solving an Empirical Puzzle.

This paper presents a transaction costs analysis of the firm size and export intensity relationship. We submit that relation-specific investments and the costs of safeguarding these investments play a significant role in export relationships. Firm size related differences with respect to these factors are used to explain the different relationships between firm size and export intensity that have been found in previous studies. The theoretical framework is tested empirically, and support is found for different industries.

Contingency Fit, Institutional Fit, and Firm Performance: A Metafit Approach to Organization–Environment Relationships

In this paper, we attempt to reconcile contingency and institutional fit approaches concerning the organization-environment relationship. While prior scholarly research has examined both theories and compared their impacts on organizational fit and performance, we lay the groundwork for a meta-fit approach by investigating how contingency and institutional fit interact to influence firm performance. We test our theoretical framework using a dataset of 3,259 respondents from 1,904 companies regarding task environmental demands and institutional demands on organizational design across a broad range of industries and firm size classes. Our results show that contingency and institutional fit provide complementary and interdependent explanations of firm performance. Importantly, our findings indicate that for firms under conditions of “quasi-fit” rather than perfect contingency fit or optimal institutional fit, improvements in contingency and/or institutional fit will result in better performance. However, firms with high contingency fit are less vulnerable to deviation from institutional fit in the formation of firm performance, while firms with perfect institutional fit will slightly decrease their performance when they strive to achieve contingency fit.

Unfunded pension liabilities and sponsoring firm credit risk: an international analysis of corporate bond spreads

This paper tests empirically whether pension information derived by corporate pension accounting disclosures is priced in corporate bond spreads. The model represents a hybrid of more traditional accounting ratio-based models of credit risk and structural models of bond spreads initiated by Merton (1974). The model is fitted to 5 years of data from 2002 to 2006 featuring companies from the US and Europe. The paper finds that while unfunded pension liabilities are priced in the overall sample, they are not priced as aggressively as traditional leverage. Furthermore, an extended model shows that the pension–credit risk relation is most evident in the US and Germany, where unfunded pension liabilities are priced more aggressively than traditional forms of leverage. No pension–credit risk relation is found in the other countries sampled, notably the UK, Netherlands and France.