Diss.--Universität Mannheim, 2001. / Notes bibliogr. Bibliogr. p. 155-165.

Interfirm governance has been the subject of buyer-supplier relationships studies for decades. Given the substantial hazards and uncertainties involved in interfirm exchanges, governance devices becomes critical in ensuring satisfactory performance outcomes. Despite the great insights provided by extant governance literature, the complexity of governance mechanisms has not been fully addressed. The goal of this dissertation is to better understand the role of contractual and relational governance in influencing interfirm co-exploration, protecting transaction-specific investments, and fostering interfirm exchanges in the challenging context of China. The first study looks at how contracts function in emerging economies in which legal institutions are underdeveloped but guanxi norms are pervasive. Drawing on transaction cost economics and institutional theory, this study disentangles two facets of contractual governance: (1) task specificity, which primarily safeguards transactions, and (2) contingency specificity, which mainly coordinates adaptations. This study examines their direct effects on exchange performance and their contingent effects, given different levels of legal inadequacy and guanxi importance. A survey of 307 manufacturer–supplier dyads in China reveals that, compared with contingency specificity, task specificity is associated with better exchange performance. However, the role of task specificity declines when the legal system is inadequate and guanxi is important. In contrast, contingency specificity is more helpful when guanxi importance is high. The second study explores how relational ties affect exchange partners’ co-exploration of novel products and processes. A tension between the strength and brokerage dimension of relational ties becomes evident during buyer-supplier co-exploration. Tie strength facilitates coordinating but creates the novelty problem; tie brokerage expands the knowledge diversity but aggravates the coordination difficulty. Drawing on the relational exchange theory, this study compares and examines the contingent value of tie strength and tie brokerage under different levels of environmental factors and exchange characteristics. The findings from a survey of 396 manufacturer–supplier dyads in China show that guanxi importance increases the effects of strength while decreases the value of brokerage. As market uncertainty increases, the role of brokerage becomes more salient. Brokerage also exerts a stronger impact on co-exploration when exchange is highly formalized, whereas tie strength has a weaker impact when exchange centralization is high. / published_or_final_version / Business / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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This study analyses the financing decisions of listed non-financial corporations in France, Germany and the UK over the period 1969 to 2000. These countries represent satisfactorily different financial structures of their classes, Le., Latinic, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon traditions, respectively. Thus, this thesis attempts to shed light on the impact of institutional differences (accounting and taxation systems, bankruptcy laws, corporate governance structure) on corporate financing mix policies. The empirical investigation comprises three main themes; capital structure (debt versus equity), debt maturity structure (short-term versus long-term debt), and debt ownership structure public versus private debt). It is obvious that factors influencing financial strategies of firms change overtime and firms are expected to adjust themselves to their target financing structure according to random events. For these reasons we use dynamic panel data and choose Generalised Methods of Moments (GMM) as an appropriate estimation procedure for our autoregressive-distributed lag model GMM methodology overcomes the problems of endogeneity, heteroscedasticity, normality, simultaneity and measurement errors, which are common for studies using firm-level data. The empirical evidence shows that corporate financing decisions are determined by both firm-specific (profitability, tangibility and maturity of assets, growth, quality, size, liquidity, payout policy, corporate tax rates, and earnings volatility), and market-related factors (term structure of interest rates, market equity premium, interest rate volatility, stock return volatility, stock price performance). However, the strength and nature of the effect of these factors are dependent on the financial environment and tradition of the countries of interest. Therefore, our research argues that financing mix decisions of firms are not only the product of their own characteristics, but also the outcome of environment and traditions in which they operate.

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Dissertation--Universität Hamburg, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Zugl.: München, Univ., Diss., 2006

Zugl.: Berlin, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2005

Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2005--Berlin.