published_or_final_version / Geography / Master / Master of Arts in China Development Studies

Mei-Li Li. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong. / Bibliography: leaves 129-131.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

 Setting up a new business that can successfully cater to international markets is a dream of many entrepreneurs. In the search for guidelines that would help potential entrepreneurs to grow and survive in global markets, research on international new ventures has been developing extensively in the last fifteen years. Social networks and unique knowledge resources spurring from them have been recognized as essential to the development of new ventures. However, our knowledge is still fairly limited as to how international new ventures make use of their social capital on the path to success. The concept of dynamic capabilities that make network-originated resource acquisition and transformation possible has mostly been absent from the international entrepreneurship research. This study is based on the assumption that it is not the access to unique knowledge resources provided by social networks that makes new ventures competitive and market-fit. It is rather how international new ventures assimilate and leverage these resources into evolutionary fitness, or growth and survival. The two distinctive roles are fulfilled by a hierarchy of classes of dynamic capabilities. A new research framework in the international entrepreneurship field, based on dynamic capability and on social capital theories, is introduced to uncover the influence and interaction effects of classes of capabilities in assimilating and leveraging knowledge originating from firms’ social capital. This dissertation is an attempt to provide an explanation of complementary, substitutive, and joint roles that social capital and dynamic capabilities play in achieving evolutionary fitness and sustainability in international new ventures. A very distinctive pattern of structural, cognitive, and relational social capital is identified as enhancing the chances of survival of international new ventures. Accounting for differences in growth, firms achieving higher evolutionary fitness are found to benefit from the joint role of two classes of dynamic capabilities and from the simultaneous pursuit of multiple paths to success. On the other hand, firms with lower evolutionary fitness are limited by their extensive deployment of assimilative capabilities and use fewer paths to evolutionary fitness. In consequence, the study also discusses the negative impact of dynamic capabilities that is related to the diminishing returns from their deployment in the pursuit of evolutionary fitness. A multi-method and multi-stage approach that combines retrospective and real-time investigations of international new ventures from the low-tech industry was used to evaluate 3 propositions and an additional observation. The empirical analysis involved 6 in-depth longitudinal case studies, social network data, survey and electronic communication data. The findings provide strong support and a significant extension to the propositions in addition to offering theoretical and managerial implications. / published_or_final_version / Business / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation is presented in the form of three essays on International Business studies. The purpose of the dissertation is to address the interdependence between the macroeconomy and finance at three levels of analysis: the conceptual level, the economic policy level, and the corporate policy level. Each essay addresses one of these levels. The empirical focus is on developing countries in general---and Latin America in particular---because in recent history these countries have experienced large economic fluctuations and major regime shifts. The introduction surveys the literature on the relationship between the financial sector and economic growth. The first essay synthesizes the literature concerning the benefits, risks, and costs of financial liberalization in developing countries and presents illustrative data on its recent implementation and outcomes. The second essay investigates the causal relationships between real activity, inflation, and financial assets' returns in seven major Latin American economies (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela) over the period 1976--1999, using vector autoregression analysis to explore the puzzling negative relationship observed elsewhere between real stock returns and inflation. The third essay investigates whether macroeconomic factors are as important as traditional firm-specific and country-specific factors as determinants of capital structure for a sample of firms from the seven Latin American countries mentioned above in the period 1986--2000 using panel data analysis. Empirical comparisons are drawn with industrial economies: the G-7 economies in the second essay and a subset of United States firms in the third. The final chapter presents the conclusions of this dissertation. The main finding is that differences between advanced and emerging economies in the relationship among economic variables do not seem as clear-cut as often assumed by academicians, policy

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Thesis (M.A. 1978) from the Department of Politics, University of Adelaide.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 84-88).