Multilevel Approaches and the Firm-Agglomeration Ambiguity in Economic Growth Studies

Empirical studies in spatial economics have shown that agglomeration economies may be a source of the uneven distribution of economic activities and economic growth across cities and regions. Both localization and urbanization economies are hypothesized to foster agglomeration and growth, but recent meta-analyses of this burgeoning body of empirical research show that the results are ambiguous. Recent overviews show that this ambiguity is fuelled by measurement issues and heterogeneity in terms of scale of time and space, aggregation, growth definitions, and the functional form of the models applied. Alternatively, in this paper, we argue that ambiguity may be due to a lack of research on firm-level performance in agglomerations. This research is necessary because the theories that underlie agglomeration economies are microeconomic in nature. Hierarchical or multilevel modeling, which allows micro levels and macro levels to be modeled simultaneously, is becoming an increasingly common practice in the social sciences. As illustrated by detailed Dutch data on firm-level productivity, employment growth and firm survival, we argue that these approaches are also suitable for reducing the ambiguity surrounding the agglomeration-firm performance relationship and for addressing spatial, sectoral and cross-level heterogeneity

There’s no beer without a smoke: Community cohesion and neighboring communities’ effects on organizational resistance to antismoking regulations in the Dutch hospitality industry

This study highlights the importance of communities in explaining organizational resistance to institutional pressures. Examining the active resistance of small bars to smoking regulations in 427 Dutch municipalities (communities), we argue that the likelihood of organizational resistance to institutional pressure from a powerful actor is affected by the social cohesion of the focal community. In addition, we propose a contiguity effect that emphasizes the broader social context of the community—its neighboring communities—as a source for support or information about appropriate ways to resist such pressures. By incorporating community attributes to account for organizations’ heterogeneous responses to institutional pressure, the study advances current institutional scholarship and demonstrates empirically how such a theory can help explain the success of relatively weak organizational actors’ resistance in the face of strong institutional pressures by the state—that is, as a result of their embeddedness in a community

Contradictory yet coherent?: Inconsistency in performance feedback and R&D investment change

In this paper, we study to what extent inconsistent feedback signals about performance affect firm adaptive behavior in terms of changes made to research-and-development (R&D) investments. We argue that inconsistency in performance feedback—based on discrepancies between two distinct performance signals—affects the degree to which such investments will be changed. Our aim is to show that accounting for inconsistent performance feedback is necessary as predictions for the direction of change in R&D investments based on the individual performance feedback signals are contradictory. Furthermore, we contribute by proposing a holistic consideration mechanism as an alternative to the selective attention mechanism previously applied to inconsistent performance feedback. Our findings show that the impact of inconsistency depends on the exact configuration of the underlying performance feedback signal discrepancies. While consistently negative performance feedback signals would amplify their impact in stimulating increased R&D investments, inconsistent performance feedback signals created more nuanced effects. Having lower performance compared to an industry-based peer group—despite doing well compared to the previous year—made firms decrease their R&D investments. For the opposite case of inconsistent performance feedback, we did not find an effect on change in R&D investments. These findings support to a degree our contention that explaining the effects of inconsistent performance feedback requires a holistic consideration theoretical mechanism instead of one involving selective attention. In sum, these findings suggest future research should take into account the differences between distinct instances of inconsistent performance feedback

Paralyzed by the Dashboard Light: Environmental Characteristics and Firm's Scanning Capabilities in East Africa

Contains fulltext : 201786.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)29 januari 201