We test whether born-to-be-green represents a signal toward potential venture capital (VC) investors on a sample of Italian, independent, unlisted, high-tech entrepreneurial firms. We employ several identification strategies by controlling for the major potential signals and the alleged selection bias between green and nongreen entrepreneurs. We exploit firm-level information about the Bactive search for VC financing. lternatively, we exploit the cross-local community variation in the awareness about environmental issues in an instrumental variable setting. Our results show that neither running a business based on green technologies nor positioning a business in a green sector per se are strongly correlated with the likelihood to get VC. Instead, we find that born-to-be-green can be a reliable signal for investors only when entrepreneurs perform activities based on green technologies/products and position their business in a green sector, at the same time. Further, we present three contingencies that moderate the association between green business propositions and the likelihood to get VC, namely the technical/scientific education of the founder(s), the origin of the firm as academic spin-out, and the presence of corporate shareholders into the venture's equity. The paper offers relevant managerial implications.

Drawing on the comparative ownership framework, we perform a comparative analysis of Chinese and Indian multinational enterprises (MNEs)' ownership strategies in knowledgeintensive cross-border acquisitions (CBAs). Specifically, we claim that due to their lower comparative ownership advantage, and the consequent higher information asymmetry, Chinese MNEs are more cautious (than Indian MNEs) in their ownership strategy. We rely on a dataset of acquisitions undertaken by high and medium-high tech Chinese and Indian MNEs worldwide during the period of 2000-2014. Results confirm that Chinese MNEs prefer lower equity control than their Indian counterparts. However, such a preference for lower equity decreases with higher home-host institutional distance and host country-specific previous experience. These factors do not seem to modify the ownership preference of Indian MNEs in the same way.

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We explore how knowledge-based connections to domestic and foreign locations affect the technological scope of firm innovations, by accounting for subnational and cross-national spatial heterogeneity. We integrate the Economic Geography and International Business perspectives, and propose a theoretical framework that distinguishes between discrete discontinuities across national contexts and continuous subnational differences, i.e. distance vs. border effects. Further, we combine the Penrosean view of managerial capabilities with the attention-based theory of the firm. Analyzing a sample of U.S.-based firms between 1990 and 2006, we show that both domestic and international knowledge connectedness affect the technological scope of firm innovations, but their effects are different. The breadth of international knowledge connectedness appears to be positively associated with the technological scope of firm innovations. However, the breadth of domestic knowledge connectedness contributes positively to the technological scope of firm innovations up to a certain point, beyond which firms appear unable to further leverage subnational heterogeneity. We trace this to the differences in the scale of international vs. domestic connections: the average firm in our sample has XX times more domestic connections than international ones. Thus, domestic search is more likely to challenge limited managerial bandwidth. Lastly, simultaneous increases in domestic and international knowledge connectedness seem to have a mutually reinforcing effect in terms of reducing the technological scope of firm innovations, suggesting that more complex geographic search for knowledge may limit the breadth of search.