Globalization

What is the impact of communicating strategy to employees in scaling ventures? As entrepreneurial ventures grow and add headcount, misalignment among employees can emerge, leading to inefficient and potentially detrimental decisions. Communicating strategy can realign employees' ideas to the firm's core framework but divert them from more distant and potentially optimal possibilities, constraining flexibility. Through a pre-registered field experiment involving 480 employees across 25 companies in 14 countries, we analyze the effects of a simple strategy communication intervention.

Prior work highlights the importance of cognitive approaches to strategy formation for startup growth. They enable entrepreneurs to strategically reason—logically and convincingly formulate their strategic choices before executing them. However, whether the value of strategic reasoning generalizes across contexts, particularly different financing environments, remains unclear.

How does international exposure shape entrepreneurial pivots? Through a field study of 84 startups across 27 countries, we develop a model that uncovers how international exposure not only spurs ventures to update their understandings of the international market but also generates pivots in the addressed market. Structural differences between markets and entrepreneurs' cognitive openness makes new information about the international market more salient. This new information opens ventures' eyes to novel opportunities.

Screening human capital based on signals such as job applications or entrepreneurial pitches is crucial for organizations. Signals are informative insofar as they are costly. Generative AI (GAI) complicates screening by lowering the cost of producing impressive signals. We model the informational effects of GAI, showing that applicants' use of GAI can increase-but also decrease-an evaluator's screening mistakes. This result depends on how GAI affects experts' signals compared to non-experts'.

Entering new markets is crucial for technology startups to scale. But it is not clear which initial users help startups learn about demand in these target, often foreign, markets. While local users can typically offer clearer signals, foreign ones can offer more transferable ones. This raises the question: How does the local vs. foreign composition of initial users shape startups' subsequent foreign user growth? I test this question on a digital product platform.

While the broader Inflation Reduction Act will substantially cut carbon emissions, the new tariffs on Chinese EVs will have the opposite effect. They risk derailing the transition to EVs, and they pit U.S. middle-class consumers against auto workers and shareholders.

In this paper, we develop a computational measure of the firm-level rhetorical nationalism. We first review the literature and develop a four-dimensional theoretical framework of nationalism relevant to firms: national pride, anti-foreign, dominant agenda, and corporate role. We then use machine-learning-based text analysis of over 41,000 annual reports of Chinese public firms from 2000 to 2020 and identify a dictionary of words for each dimension.