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We advance a two-stage theoretical model which contends that the export performance of emerging economy firms (EEFs) will depend both upon their firm-specific capabilities and their home institutional environments. Specifically, we argue that EEFs will be more likely to export when facing more uncertainty at home from greater political instability, substantial informal competition, and high corruption. Furthermore, we hypothesize that firmsÕ export intensities will be contingent upon specialized internal capabilities such as a skilled workforce, top managerial experience, and access to external technologies. We test these hypotheses using a dataset of more than 16,000 firms from the four BRIC economies (i.e., Brazil, Russia, China and India). Our results confirm that political instability and informal competition have robust effects on the export propensity of EEFs, whilst export intensity is contingent upon the availability of skilled workers and access to external technologies via licensing.

y * This version of the article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the publisher's final version AKA Version of Record.

A growing body of research looks into business-led efforts to create social value by improving the socio-economic well-being of Base of the Pyramid (BoP) communities. Research shows that businesses that pursue these strategies—or BoP businesses—face distinct sets of challenges that require unique capabilities. There is, however, limited effort to synthesize current evidence on the mechanisms through which these businesses create social value. We systematically review the literature on BoP businesses, covering 110 studies published in business and management journals. We start by using bibliographic analysis to map the broad contours of the literature in terms of its common theoretical and empirical approaches, intellectual core, and evolution in time. We subsequently conduct a qualitative content analysis on the identified articles to synthesize their main findings. The analysis leads to a conceptual framework that explicates the antecedents, constraints, capabilities, and contingencies that drive social value creation. In addition to providing a rich and systematically organized account of the evidence, our analysis provides a critical reflection on the ethical dilemmas of social value creation efforts for the BoP, and outlines promising avenues for future research.

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are increasingly used by corporations for benchmarking and communicating their sustainability performance. The SDGs have several features that make them attractive for this purpose, including their universality, specificity and, in many cases, direct linkage with corporate outcomes. Corporations typically disclose their engagement strategies and outcomes voluntarily without the aid of standardized and externally verified reports. This creates a risk of corporations misusing the SDGs for ''greenwashing'' and ''impact washing'' their activities, for example through selective reporting of favorable information. Inaccurate and non-transparent disclosure can also introduce information asymmetries that distort decision-making by investors and other stakeholders. Increasing institutional change towards new measurement frameworks (such as GRI and SASB standards) and regulatory oversight to monitor disclosure (e.g., the EU's Non-Financial Reporting Directive) is likely to improve transparency and reliability in sustainability reporting. This study critically examines the prospects of institutional changes that facilitate the integration, measurement, and reporting of corporate sustainability in general and the SDGs in particular. It also explores emerging innovations in corporate governance and regulation that seek to improve the integration of sustainability issues in corporations and financial markets.

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The literature on Base of the Pyramid (BoP) strategies emphasizes that creating social value requires collaborative, multi-stakeholder business approaches. However, there is limited understanding of how businesses can successfully coordinate such value creation processes in the developing economies that face significant institutional voids. This study adopts a business model perspective for analyzing social value creation processes that span organizational boundaries. We introduce a novel, theoretically grounded business model framework that helps conceptualize social value by locating the various loci of value creation, and the stakeholders that partake in creating and capturing this value. We subsequently analyze the mechanisms of social value creation in M-Pesa, a renowned boundary-spanning mobile money system that has advanced financial inclusion among tens of millions of users in Kenya. The results show that information and communications technology can help advance social value creation by reducing the cost of coordinating boundary-spanning business models that integrate diverse societal stakeholders. The results further point to uneven distributional outcomes in self-governing social value creation strategies where the focal firm plays a coordinating role.

The COVID-19 crisis has introduced unique tradeoffs between health and economic risk, leading to a “life vs. livelihoods conundrum.” This study contributes to research on adversity and entrepreneurship by examining the implications of the pandemic for gender differences in enterprise performance. We further consider how public policy responses in the domains of public health and economic support moderate the potential gendered effects of the pandemic. Data analysis of more than 20,000 enterprises across 38 countries shows that women-owned enterprises were more adversely affected by the pandemic, and that stronger public health policy responses helped reduce the observed gap in performance.