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Protection For Sale Under Monopolistic Competition: An Empirical Investigation, Pao Li Chang, Myoung-Jae Lee Aug 2006

Protection For Sale Under Monopolistic Competition: An Empirical Investigation, Pao Li Chang, Myoung-Jae Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a general empirical framework to estimate the protection-for-sale model, where the protection regime shifts according to a sector's market structure (perfectly or monopolistically competitive). We base the protection structure on Grossman and Helpman (1994) for the subset of perfectly competitive sectors and on Chang (2005) for the subset of monopolistically competitive sectors. The two protection regimes are simultaneously estimated with joint constraints. The results of the J-test consistently reject the homogeneous (perfect competition) protection-for-sale model often adopted in previous literature and suggest a direction of improvement toward the proposed heterogeneous protection structure model.

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Characterizing Exchange Rate Policy In East Asia: A Reconsideration, Hwee Kwan Chow Aug 2006

Characterizing Exchange Rate Policy In East Asia: A Reconsideration, Hwee Kwan Chow

Research Collection School Of Economics

Frankel and Wei [Frankel, J. A., & Wei, S.-J. (1994). Yen bloc or dollar bloc: Exchange rate policies of the East Asian economies. In I. Takatoshi & A. Krueger (Eds.), Macroeconomic linkages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press] developed and popularized a method for uncovering the implicit weights assigned to major international currencies constituting a currency basket. We extend the methodology in two dimensions: include regional competitive pressure and employ a vector autoregressive (VAR) model to overcome simultaneity bias. With these modifications, we confirm the prominent role of the US dollar in the exchange rate policy of East Asian economies beyond …

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The Coevolution Of Economic And Political Development, Fali Huang Aug 2006

The Coevolution Of Economic And Political Development, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper establishes a simple model of long run economic and political development, which is driven by the inherent technical features of different production factors, and political conflicts among factor owners on how to divide the outputs. The main capital form in economy evolves from land to physical capital and then to human capital, which enables their respective owners (landlords, capitalists, and workers) to gain political powers in the same sequence, shaping the political development path from monarchy to elite ruling and finally to full suffrage. When it is too costly for any group of factor owners to repress others, …

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An Energy-Efficient And Access Latency Optimized Indexing Scheme For Wireless Data Broadcast, Yuxia Yao, Xueyan Tang, Ee Peng Lim, Aixin Sun Aug 2006

An Energy-Efficient And Access Latency Optimized Indexing Scheme For Wireless Data Broadcast, Yuxia Yao, Xueyan Tang, Ee Peng Lim, Aixin Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data broadcast is an attractive data dissemination method in mobile environments. To improve energy efficiency, existing air indexing schemes for data broadcast have focused on reducing tuning time only, i.e., the duration that a mobile client stays active in data accesses. On the other hand, existing broadcast scheduling schemes have aimed at reducing access latency through nonflat data broadcast to improve responsiveness only. Not much work has addressed the energy efficiency and responsiveness issues concurrently. This paper proposes an energy-efficient indexing scheme called MHash that optimizes tuning time and access latency in an integrated fashion. MHash reduces tuning time by …

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Corporate Financial Policy And The Value Of Cash, Michael Faulkender, Rong Wang Aug 2006

Corporate Financial Policy And The Value Of Cash, Michael Faulkender, Rong Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine the cross-sectional variation in the marginal value of corporate cash holdings that arises from differences in corporate financial policy. We begin by providing semi-quantitative predictions for the value of an extra dollar of cash depending upon the likely use of that dollar, and derive a set of intuitive hypotheses to test empirically. By examining the variation in excess stock returns over the fiscal year, we find that the marginal value of cash declines with larger cash holdings, higher leverage, better access to capital markets, and as firms choose greater cash distribution via dividends rather than repurchases.

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Social Network Dynamics For Open Source Software Projects, Y. Long, Keng Siau Aug 2006

Social Network Dynamics For Open Source Software Projects, Y. Long, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Drawing on social network theories and previous studies, this research is an initial effort to explore the dynamics of the social network structure in Open Source Software (OSS) teams. Three projects were selected from SourceForge.net in term of their similarities as well as their differences. Monthly data were extracted from the bug tracking system in order to achieve a longitudinal view of the interaction pattern of each project. Social network analysis was used to generate the indices of network structure. The finding suggests that the interaction pattern of OSS projects evolves from a single hub at the beginning to a …

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Using Mobile Technology In Education: Perspectives Of Students And Instructors, H. Sheng, F. Nah, Keng Siau Aug 2006

Using Mobile Technology In Education: Perspectives Of Students And Instructors, H. Sheng, F. Nah, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile technology has the tremendous potential in supporting and improving education and its delivery. As a new phenomenon that is gaining popularity, the values of mobile technology in education need to be better researched and understood. In this research, we used the Value-Focused Thinking approach to interview students and instructors to identify the values of education that are enabled by mobile technology. These values are represented in the form of a means-ends objective network that not only captures the values of education facilitated by mobile technology but also depicts the relationships between these values. The values of education enabled by …

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Understanding Intrinsic Factors Influencing Benefit Maximization Of Is Usage, Brenda Eschenbrenner, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah Aug 2006

Understanding Intrinsic Factors Influencing Benefit Maximization Of Is Usage, Brenda Eschenbrenner, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research uses the Repertory Grid technique to understand intrinsic factors influencing benefit maximization of IS usage. The results show that domain-relevant skills, task motivation, cognitive/work style attributes, individual characteristics (identified as creativity traits) and personal characteristics (identified as innovativeness traits) influence benefit maximization of IS usage. The findings not only provide insights on ways to increase quality of IS usage in organizations but are also helpful for identifying approaches that foster attributes leading to increased benefit realization from IS usage.

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A Hybrid Architecture Combining Reactive Plan Execution And Reactive Learning, Samin Karim, Liz Sonenberg, Ah-Hwee Tan Aug 2006

A Hybrid Architecture Combining Reactive Plan Execution And Reactive Learning, Samin Karim, Liz Sonenberg, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developing software agents has been complicated by the problem of how knowledge should be represented and used. Many researchers have identified that agents need not require the use of complex representations, but in many cases suffice to use “the world” as their representation. However, the problem of introspection, both by the agents themselves and by (human) domain experts, requires a knowledge representation with a higher level of abstraction that is more ‘understandable’. Learning and adaptation in agents has traditionally required knowledge to be represented at an arbitrary, low-level of abstraction. We seek to create an agent that has the capability …

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Bias And Controversy: Beyond The Statistical Deviation, Hady W. Lauw, Ee Peng Lim, Ke Wang Aug 2006

Bias And Controversy: Beyond The Statistical Deviation, Hady W. Lauw, Ee Peng Lim, Ke Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we investigate how deviation in evaluation activities may reveal bias on the part of reviewers and controversy on the part of evaluated objects. We focus on a 'data-centric approach' where the evaluation data is assumed to represent the ground truth'. The standard statistical approaches take evaluation and deviation at face value. We argue that attention should be paid to the subjectivity of evaluation, judging the evaluation score not just on 'what is being said' (deviation), but also on 'who says it' (reviewer) as well as on 'whom it is said about' (object). Furthermore, we observe that bias …

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Learning The Unified Kernel Machines For Classification, Steven C. H. Hoi, Michael R. Lyu, Edward Y. Chang Aug 2006

Learning The Unified Kernel Machines For Classification, Steven C. H. Hoi, Michael R. Lyu, Edward Y. Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Kernel machines have been shown as the state-of-the-art learning techniques for classification. In this paper, we propose a novel general framework of learning the Unified Kernel Machines (UKM) from both labeled and unlabeled data. Our proposed framework integrates supervised learning, semi-supervised kernel learning, and active learning in a unified solution. In the suggested framework, we particularly focus our attention on designing a new semi-supervised kernel learning method, i.e., Spectral Kernel Learning (SKL), which is built on the principles of kernel target alignment and unsupervised kernel design. Our algorithm is related to an equivalent quadratic programming problem that can be efficiently …

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The Political Economy Of Poverty Reduction: A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Provinces, John A. Donaldson Aug 2006

The Political Economy Of Poverty Reduction: A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Provinces, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Is growth good for the poor? In theory, yes. As one influential report on China’s “War on Poverty” suggested, ”Obviously robust economic growth helps reduce poverty, as long as the gains are reasonably distributed” (Rozelle et al. 2000). In practice as well, growth is often a crucial ingredient in the poverty reduction recipe. While this relationship is well founded, important exceptions present themselves – some areas grow, but poverty persists; the economies of other areas remain apparently stagnant, yet poverty diminishes. These exceptions, if studied, will not only illuminate further the causal relationship between these two concepts, but also provide …

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Can't Afford To See A Doctor? The Difficulties Of Reforming China's Healthcare System, Knowledge@Smu Jul 2006

Can't Afford To See A Doctor? The Difficulties Of Reforming China's Healthcare System, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

An article co-published on May 22 by China Social Science Literature Publishing house and China Medical Industry Magazine, entitled “Healthcare Greenpaper,” reviews a series of problems associated with China’s healthcare reform over the past 10 years. Of the five biggest problems identified by the paper, the worst one is prohibitively expensive treatment. To examine this issue, Knowledge@Wharton interviewed a variety of experts and officials on the state of health care in China and the changing relationships between hospitals and patients.

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Empowerment Through Choice?: A Critical Analysis Of The Effects Of Choice In Organizations, Roy Y. J. Chua, Sheena S. Iyengar Jul 2006

Empowerment Through Choice?: A Critical Analysis Of The Effects Of Choice In Organizations, Roy Y. J. Chua, Sheena S. Iyengar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The provision of choice is one of the most common vehicles through which managers empower employees in organizations. Although past psychological and organizational research persuasively suggests that choice confers personal agency, and is thus intrinsically motivating, emerging research indicates that there could be potential pitfalls. In this chapter, we examine the various factors that could influence the effects of choice. Specifically, we examine individual-level factors such as the chooser’s socioeconomic status and cultural background. We also examine situational factors such as the content of choice and the number of choices offered. We then expand our discussion on the effect of …

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Smu Celebrates Third Batch Of 628 Graduates, Singapore Management University Jul 2006

Smu Celebrates Third Batch Of 628 Graduates, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases and News

No abstract provided.

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Winter Wine Tourists In Canada's Niagara Region, Carmen W. Cullen, Eugene Kaciak, Linda Bramble, Barry Wright, Alfred E. Seaman, John Joseph Williams Jul 2006

Winter Wine Tourists In Canada's Niagara Region, Carmen W. Cullen, Eugene Kaciak, Linda Bramble, Barry Wright, Alfred E. Seaman, John Joseph Williams

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper represents the first stage in a multi-seasonal investigation of peak, off-peak and shoulder season winery tourists in Canada’s Niagara region. The goal of the study reported here is to better understand the off-peak winery tourist – that strange creature who chooses to visit a winery in the dead of Canadian winter. Who are these people?

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Ontosearch: A Full-Text Search Engine For The Semantic Web, Xing Jiang, Ah-Hwee Tan Jul 2006

Ontosearch: A Full-Text Search Engine For The Semantic Web, Xing Jiang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

OntoSearch, a full-text search engine that exploits ontological knowledge for document retrieval, is presented in this paper. Different from other ontology based search engines, OntoSearch does not require a user to specify the associated concepts of his/her queries. Domain ontology in OntoSearch is in the form of a semantic network. Given a keyword based query, OntoSearch infers the related concepts through a spreading activation process in the domain ontology. To provide personalized information access, we further develop algorithms to learn and exploit user ontology model based on a customized view of the domain ontology. The proposed system has been applied …

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Keyframe Retrieval By Keypoints: Can Point-To-Point Matching Help?, Wanlei Zhao, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo Jul 2006

Keyframe Retrieval By Keypoints: Can Point-To-Point Matching Help?, Wanlei Zhao, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bag-of-words representation with visual keypoints has recently emerged as an attractive approach for video search. In this paper, we study the degree of improvement when point-to-point (P2P) constraint is imposed on the bag-of-words. We conduct investigation on two tasks: near-duplicate keyframe (NDK) retrieval, and high-level concept classification, covering parts of TRECVID 2003 and 2005 datasets. In P2P matching, we propose a one-to-one symmetric keypoint matching strategy to diminish the noise effect during keyframe comparison. In addition, a new multi-dimensional index structure is proposed to speed up the matching process with keypoint filtering. Through experiments, we demonstrate that P2P constraint can …

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A Novel Privacy Preserving Authentication And Access Control Scheme For Pervasive Computing Environments, K. Ren, Wenjing Lou, K. Kim, Robert H. Deng Jul 2006

A Novel Privacy Preserving Authentication And Access Control Scheme For Pervasive Computing Environments, K. Ren, Wenjing Lou, K. Kim, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Privacy and security are two important but seemingly contradictory objectives in a pervasive computing environment (PCE). On one hand, service providers want to authenticate legitimate users and make sure they are accessing their authorized services in a legal way. On the other hand, users want to maintain the necessary privacy without being tracked down for wherever they are and whatever they are doing. In this paper, a novel privacy preserving authentication and access control scheme to secure the interactions between mobile users and services in PCEs is proposed. The proposed scheme seamlessly integrates two underlying cryptographic primitives, namely blind signature …

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Voter Strategies With Restricted Choice Menus, Kenneth Benoit, Daniela Giannetti, Michael Laver Jul 2006

Voter Strategies With Restricted Choice Menus, Kenneth Benoit, Daniela Giannetti, Michael Laver

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Mixed-member electoral systems require voters simultaneously to cast ballots in single-member districts (SMD) and multimember, proportional representation (PR) constituencies. It may be that not all parties offer candidates in both electoral contexts, however. In this event would-be voters for some parties may find themselves ‘frustrated’ by the restricted choice menu on offer in the SMD, being effectively forced to split their vote between different parties. Here we explore the different behaviours of frustrated voters in the 1996 mixed-member election to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies, characterizing these as being either in some sense non-strategic (concerned above all with the relative policy …

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Temporal Dynamics Of The Urban Heat Island Of Singapore, Winston T. L. Chow, Matthias Roth Jul 2006

Temporal Dynamics Of The Urban Heat Island Of Singapore, Winston T. L. Chow, Matthias Roth

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The temporal variability of the canopy‐level urban heat island (UHI) of Singapore is examined for different temporal scales on the basis of observations during a 1‐year period. Temperature data obtained from different urban areas (commercial, Central Business District (CBD), high‐rise and low‐rise housing) are compared with ‘rural’ reference data and analysed with respect to meteorological variables and differences in land use. The results indicate that the peak UHI magnitude occurs 3–4 h (>6 h) after sunset in the commercial area, (at other urban sites). Higher UHI intensities generally occur during the southwest monsoon period of May–August, with a maximum …

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'A Hundred Flowers Bloom': The Re-Emergence Of The Chinese Press In Post-Suharto Indonesia, Chang Yau Hoon Jul 2006

'A Hundred Flowers Bloom': The Re-Emergence Of The Chinese Press In Post-Suharto Indonesia, Chang Yau Hoon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

During the whole 32 years of Suharto’s regime (1966–98), Chinese publications and the use of Chinese language in public were officially banned in Indonesia. As a result, printed matter in Chinese characters that entered Indonesia was classified as ‘prohibited imports’ (Heryanto 1999: 327). This prohibition came to an end after the fall of Suharto, as part of the process of democratization and Reformasi. The post-Suharto era of Reformasi is thus celebrated for the dramatic revival of the freedom of the press and media in Indonesia and many previously banned as well as new publications have emerged since Suharto’s fall. The …

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The Law Of International Commercial Arbitration In Singapore, Warren B. Chik Jul 2006

The Law Of International Commercial Arbitration In Singapore, Warren B. Chik

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The Singapore dispute resolution landscape entered the new millennium with the reconstruction of the dual carriageway for arbitration. In 2002, the old road to arbitral resolution of disputes ( i.e. , the old Arbitration Act and the old International Arbitration Act ) were reconstructed and what emerged were two updated legislations: the Arbitration Act and the International Arbitration Act . At about the same time, the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC) also diversified with the introduction of a new set of Domestic Arbitration Rules.

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A Modified Family Of Power Transformations, Zhenlin Yang Jul 2006

A Modified Family Of Power Transformations, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

A modified family of power transformation, called the dual power transformation, is proposed. The new transformation is shown to possess properties similar to those of the well-known Box-Cox power transformation, but overcomes the long-standing truncation problem of the latter. It generates a rich family of distributions that is seen to be very useful in modeling and analysis of durations and event-times.

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Exchange-Rate Systems And Interest-Rate Behaviour: The Experience Of Hong Kong And Singapore, Yiu Kuen Tse, Paul S. L. Yip Jul 2006

Exchange-Rate Systems And Interest-Rate Behaviour: The Experience Of Hong Kong And Singapore, Yiu Kuen Tse, Paul S. L. Yip

Research Collection School Of Economics

The Currency Board System in Hong Kong and the monitoring band system in Singapore are important benchmarks for two different exchange-rate systems. In this paper we consider the implications of the two exchange-rate systems on the interest-rate behaviour of the two economies. We examine the domestic–US interest differentials under the two exchange-rate regimes during the Asian Financial Crisis as well as the pre-and post-crisis periods. Using a bivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model, we also investigate whether there is any change in the correlation between the domestic and US interest rates due to the Asian Financial Crisis.

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Weak Monotonicity Characterizes Deterministic Dominant-Strategy Implementation, Sushil Bikhchandani, Shurojit Chatterji, Ron Lavi, Ahuva Mu'alem, Noam Nisan, Arunava Sen Jul 2006

Weak Monotonicity Characterizes Deterministic Dominant-Strategy Implementation, Sushil Bikhchandani, Shurojit Chatterji, Ron Lavi, Ahuva Mu'alem, Noam Nisan, Arunava Sen

Research Collection School Of Economics

We characterize dominant-strategy incentive compatibility with multidimensional types. A deterministic social choice function is dominant-strategy incentive compatible if and only if it is weakly monotone (W-Mon). The W-Mon requirement is the following: If changing one agent's type (while keeping the types of other agents fixed) changes the outcome under the social choice function, then the resulting difference in utilities of the new and original outcomes evaluated at the new type of this agent must be no less than this difference in utilities evaluated at the original type of this agent.

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Contract Law, Chee Ho Tham, Pearlie Koh, Pey Woan Lee Jul 2006

Contract Law, Chee Ho Tham, Pearlie Koh, Pey Woan Lee

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

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Extraction Of Coherent Relevant Passages Using Hidden Markov Models, Jing Jiang, Chengxiang Zhai Jul 2006

Extraction Of Coherent Relevant Passages Using Hidden Markov Models, Jing Jiang, Chengxiang Zhai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In information retrieval, retrieving relevant passages, as opposed to whole documents, not only directly benefits the end user by filtering out the irrelevant information within a long relevant document, but also improves retrieval accuracy in general. A critical problem in passage retrieval is to extract coherent relevant passages accurately from a document, which we refer to as passage extraction. While much work has been done on passage retrieval, the passage extraction problem has not been seriously studied. Most existing work tends to rely on presegmenting documents into fixed-length passages which are unlikely optimal because the length of a relevant passage …

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Private Information Retrieval Using Trusted Hardware, Shuhong Wang, Xuhua Ding, Robert H. Deng, Feng Bao Jul 2006

Private Information Retrieval Using Trusted Hardware, Shuhong Wang, Xuhua Ding, Robert H. Deng, Feng Bao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many theoretical PIR (Private Information Retrieval) constructions have been proposed in the past years. Though information theoretically secure, most of them are impractical to deploy due to the prohibitively high communication and computation complexity. The recent trend in outsourcing databases fuels the research on practical PIR schemes. In this paper, we propose a new PIR system by making use of trusted hardware. Our system is proven to be information theoretically secure. Furthermore, we derive the computation complexity lower bound for hardware-based PIR schemes and show that our construction meets the lower bounds for both the communication and computation costs, respectively.

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Partnering Strategies And Performance Of Smes' International Joint Ventures, Jane Wenzhen Lu, Paul W. Beamish Jul 2006

Partnering Strategies And Performance Of Smes' International Joint Ventures, Jane Wenzhen Lu, Paul W. Beamish

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The international joint venture (IJV) is an important mode in the internationalization of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Internationalization in turn is an entrepreneurial behavior in the pursuit of growth. Partnering strategies in the formation of IJVs can have significant effects on the outcome of SMEs' international expansion. In this study, we examine the performance implications of two types of resources contributed by SMEs' IJV partners, host country knowledge and size-based resources. We develop and test three sets of hypotheses about the longevity and financial performance of a sample of 1117 international joint ventures established in 43 countries by 614 …

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