Ethical Considerations in Crowdfunding

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How does your garden grow? The interface of employee and sales growth post IPO

Research Summary: Firms often succumb to a growth imperative, yet little is known about how congruence between various forms of growth affects firm value. We argue that the (in)congruence between net hiring rates (e.g., growth in the number of employees) and sales growth has significant implications for firm value, assessed via Tobin\u27s Q. We further contend that R&D expenditures and industry dynamism—factors that influence a firm\u27s ability to realize value creation—moderate the relationship between growth pattern and firm value. We use a sample of 1,181 firms that conducted their initial public offerings from 1996 to 2006 to test our conceptual model. Findings indicate that employee-dominant growth is most strongly associated with firm value, and that high levels of R&D expenditures and industry dynamism intensify these relationships. Managerial Summary: Growth is a goal and challenge for many firms, and navigating the various demands of growth represents a particularly promising opportunity for firms that recently went public. We study how firms can manage the growth process in a way that enhances firm value. Using a sample of 1,181 firms that conducted their initial public offerings from 1996 to 2006, we explore the interplay of employee and sales growth rates on value creation. We find that an employee-dominant growth pattern was more strongly related to firm value than the other patterns. Our findings also suggest that managers, especially those in firms that invest in R&D and operating in dynamic industries, should avoid a strong focus on sales growth without also ensuring growth in employees

Does board composition affect the gender pay gap?

By matching a unique firm-level gender pay gap (GPG) data with the corporate board- and firm-characteristics, we find that firms with the presence of foreign directors on board reduce the GPG of the firms in Britain. This result is more pronounced with the profitable firms, and with those that have less than 5,000 employees.The findings suggest that policymakers’ emphasis on achieving diversity on the corporate board may also help improve equality in pay

The Role of Crowdfunding in Cultural Entrepreneurship: A Business Network Perspective

The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of crowdfunding (CF) in cultural entrepreneurship processes by adopting a Business Network perspective. The literature on Cultural Entrepreneurship emphasises the distinctive features of such ventures and portrays an entirely different entrepreneurial journey. Concurrently, CF is emerging as a key topic in management research and an innovative and ‘clever’ solution for start-up ventures. However, thus far, the analysis of the role of CF in cultural start-up processes is limited. Moreover, from our perspective, existing literature on CF lacks the ability to understand the actual complexity of the “networked” nature of such contexts. Therefore, we have adopted the Business Network perspective of the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group (IMP) to study two highly revelatory cultural projects (i.e., RATATÀ Festival and BRUTI card game) backed by the rewardbased CF platform Ulule. We believe that studying the role of CF in cultural entrepreneurship through the lens of the Business Network perspective provides a fine-grained analysis of the development paths of cultural ventures in terms of key actors and related resources, as well as in terms of interconnected activities