The objective of this research is to deepen in the role played by formal institutions on the different types of entrepreneurship (opportunity and necessity) as well as in its relative importance. The institutions we analyze are property rights, business freedom, fiscal freedom, labor freedom, financial capital and educational capital. Our results show that, in general, opportunity entrepreneurship benefits from an improvement of these institutions, while necessity entrepreneurship is damaged. This will positively influence the relative presence of opportunity entrepreneurship that is usually considered to be of greater quality and is more clearly related to economic development in a country.

The objective of this study is to integrate both multimarket contact and strategic similarity in the analysis of entry decisions. We also analyze the role of the reciprocity of contacts, market concentration, and coordination mechanisms at moderating the relationship. Our hypotheses are tested through the analysis of entry behavior into new geographical markets in the Spanish savings bank market. Interestingly, our results offer an opportunity of conciliating conflicting evidence in both the multimarket-mutual forbearance and the heterogeneity-rivalry literatures and offer further support to the U-inverted influence of multimarket contact on entry. Given the coordination assumption implicit in the theory and the possible presence of unobservable variables, we also offer a method to cope with the common-actor problem.

This paper analyzes opportunity entrepreneurship through the interplay between formal and informal institutions. It seems evident that not all entrepreneurial initiatives have the same quality, thus the goal of a society should be to encourage the activities that best contribute to innovation and value generation. We theorize that informal institutions are contingent to the formal institutional environment where the new ventures operate. Our empirical results, using GEM data, confirm that, in countries with a more individualistic orientation, the relationship between formal institutions and opportunity entrepreneurship is more intense, as happens in societies with lower levels of uncertainty avoidance.

Entrepreneurs play a key role in introducing innovations into the market. However, the extant literature has found that the degree of innovation within new ventures varies considerably and that these differences can be related to the individual factors of entrepreneurs. In this article, we go one step further and suggest that the influence of individual factors on innovation is contingent on the institutional context. We use a sample of more than 140,000 entrepreneurs from 101 countries that have participated in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) project between 2005 and 2015. Our results show that individual characteristics of the entrepreneur, such as risk tolerance, entrepreneurial alertness, education and previous entrepreneurial experience, influence innovation in new ventures but that their effect is reinforced by an institutional context with high economic freedom.

This article extends previous research on network industries by analyzing the role that firm strategy plays in markets where network effects are important. The authors postulate that firms can benefit from the existence of network effects through their strategic choices. The main premise of this article is that companies, by influencing expectations, coordination, and compatibility, can leverage network effects and network value. The authors empirically test their hypotheses in the mobile telecommunications industry, a paradigmatic example of a network industry. This study not only seeks to understand the impact of firm strategy on network value but also analyzes the impact of the latter on firm performance.

This article examines the influence of complementary resources on the performance of incumbents after a radical technological change. In investigating this relationship, we join the technological management literature and the institution‐based view of strategy and maintain that the value of complementary resources is contingent on the institutional environment in which the firm operates. In particular, we submit that formal institutions, both economic and political, moderate the relationship between the stock of complementary assets and firm performance. We test our hypotheses in the context of the world mobile telecommunications industry (39 countries and 134 mobile service providers). Our findings reveal how these resources are more valuable for incumbents in markets where market‐supporting institutions are weaker and political stability is higher. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Banking activities were highly regulated all around the world until the final decades of the last century. Traditionally, banks (1) were not allowed to use the competitive variables usually employed in other industries, such as prices or location. The existence of interest ceilings on credits and deposits, or the limitations to the opening of new banks or bank branches outside a reduced geographical area, substantially restricted competition within this sector. One of the possible consequences of this situation was that some banks operated branches in their local marketsöwhere they did not face limitations to the new openings öthat would not have been active in the absence of regulation. Given that price competition did not exist and that foreign (and sometimes even national) banks were not allowed to compete, those branches could have reached a reasonable level of profitability and remained in the market.As several scholars have argued, smaller banks were the main winners from regulation, given that they were protected from competition from larger and more efficient firms (Kroszner and Strahan, 1999). As the evidence from several banking markets shows, once branching restrictions were eliminated, the subsequent expansion process was led by the most efficient firms (Fuentelsaz and Go¨mez, 2001;Jayaratne and Strahan, 1997), with a reduction in the loan rates charged to creditors and an increase in the rates paid to depositors as a potential consequence. Therefore, the new competitive environment created by deregulation could be understood positively, as it would result in higher levels of competition, lower average prices, and benefits for consumers.However, this positive view of the effects of deregulation was soon complemented by a second line of research, which points to the risks associated with the elimination of restrictions. This second line of reasoning has suggested that deregulation and its associated phenomena (mergers, entry, and exit) could have had a perverse effect on the availability of banking services to specific social groups or to some geographic

Much of the literature dedicated to the analysis of entry timing decisions has been devoted to the study of their consequences in terms of performance. However, only a limited amount of effort has been dedicated to analyzing the factors that determine these decisions. In addition, previous papers have centered their efforts on the product dimension, paying no attention to entry into new geographical markets. This paper departs from previous works in this respect and extends the entry timing literature through a consideration of the geographical side of entry. Our analysis shows that organizational size, organizational competence, and organizational experience appear as key factors when explaining the pattern of geographic diversification. Our results also indicate that diversification takes place sequentially, first proceeding to closer locations, then occupying markets further from the origin. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.