International Business Commons^™

From Doing Business To B-Ready: World Bank’S New Rankings Represent A Rebrand, Not A Revamp, Fernanda G. Nicola, Dhaisy Paredes Guzman

Popular Media

In 2021, the World Bank shut down one of its flagship projects: the Doing Business index, a global ranking system that measured how easy it was to start and run a business in 190 countries. It followed an independent investigation that found World Bank officials had manipulated the rankings to favor powerful countries, including China and Saudi Arabia. The scandal raised serious concerns about the use of global benchmarks to shape development policy. Now, the Bank is trying again. In October 2024, it launched its newest flagship report, Business Ready. The 2025 spring meeting of the World Bank and its …

Revisiting Institutional Voids: Advancing The International Business Literature By Leveraging Social Sciences, Marleen Dieleman, Stanislav Markus, Tazeeb Rajwani, George White Iii

Faculty Publications

Institutions are vital for solving collective action problems and enabling functioning markets. Based on this notion, the institutional voids literature has offered a dynamic research agenda for international business scholarship. In this perspective article, we leverage work from political science, development economics, legal studies, and anthropology to: (a) expose hidden assumptions about institutional voids in the management literature; (b) propose new directions for research based on our revised assumptions; and (c) provide direction-specific theoretical constructs from other social sciences to stimulate theory-building and empirical inquiry into institutional voids. We develop a framework that identifies four revised assumptions about institutional voids …

What's Your Pitch? The Power Of Wow! (Worksheet For The Webinar On January 18, 2011), Connie I. Reimers-Hild

Kimmel Education and Research Center: Faculty and Staff Publications

Elevator pitches are created to sell your idea, business, product or service in 30 seconds or less (the time it takes to go from the first floor to the top of the building in an elevator). A great pitch has the power to help anyone...from a University employee to a new entrepreneur to a team working in a high-growth firm.

It’s important to develop and practice an effective pitch, complete with an awesome "Wow Factor," so you are ready to use it under fire (pretend you just stepped onto an elevator with Warren Buffett or Bill Gates)!

This interactive webinar …

Immigrant Business Enterprises: A Classification Framework Conceptualization And Test, Roberto Curci, Robert Mackoy

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

This article proposes the Immigrant Business Enterprises Classification Framework to organize immigrant-owned businesses into categories associated with different levels of business integration into a host country's mainstream business community. The article applies the framework and reports the findings of structured face-to-face interviews with 199 Hispanic business enterprises (HBEs) in Indianapolis. The authors find Hispanic-owned businesses hold different characteristics depending upon the integration category in which they are classified; the findings suggest that to support immigrant entrepreneurship, governments, business development organizations, and researchers should address category-specific challenges, opportunities, and needs.

"When Are The Japanese Japanese?" Negotiating Japanese Cultural Identity In A Japan-Us Binational Organization, Noriko Yagi

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

Based on a seven-month ethnographic study in a Japanese subsidiary in the US located in Southern California, this research describes when the organization members categorized as the Japanese are Japanese. One of the purposes of the research is to challenge the widely held assumption in the body of international business research that every organization member from a certain nation is under the influence of the national culture all the time in terms of its impact on their behavior, cognition and emotive expressions. This research brings the assumption that an individual could have multiple cultural identities into the analysis. Under this …

Ethnography As Research Methodology For International Business Studies : Its Complementary Role To The Methodology Based On A Positivistic Paradigm, Noriko Yagi

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

A goal of this paper is to introduce ethnography to the Japanese audience as research methodology for international business studies. Ethnography is defined as the study of describing a culture of a group of people. In the United States, ethnography has been established as one of the research methods in organizational studies. This does not apply to Japan, however. Thus, the paper aims to fill the void and inform the Japanese audience about how ethnography can contribute extending our understanding of the complexity of international cross-cultural management. The paper begins with outlining characteristics of ethnography in comparison to research methodology …

Mexican Peso Futures And Exchange Rate Volatility, Roberto Curci, Cynthia J. Brown

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

The reintroduction of Mexican peso futures contracts in April 1995 resulted from a refocus of governmental policy to the use of market-based mechanisms to stabilize the exchange rate. Interest in the Mexican peso future contracts has been high as investors look to manage their exposure from transactions and investments denominated in pesos. This study utilizes a VAR framework to analyze the relationship between the volatility in theMexican peso spot market and futures contracts trading activity. Shocks to the exchange rate volatility lead to increased hedging-type activity. Furthermore, an increase in futures contracts trading activity (reflecting additional speculation-type activity) results in …