Industry Growth, Climate, and Trade

Signaling Legitimacy to Foreign Investors: Evidence from Chinese IPOs on U.S. Markets

Xu Jin
Donald Patton
Martin Kenney
2015

From 1999-2010 120 Chinese emerging growth firms undertook initial public stock offerings on U.S. markets. This provided a remarkable natural experiment for exploring how this class of organizations from a radically different political economy established their legitimacy and how, once established, this legitimacy permitted organizational and personnel flexibility for later firms. The increased legitimacy allowed changes in the backgrounds of the members of the IPO top management team (TMT) and independent members of the board of directors (BoD). We find that overall composition of both...

Globalizing Solar: Industry Specialization and Firm Demands for Trade Protection

Jonas Meckling
Llewelyn Hughes
2015

Governments are investing billions of dollars in low-carbon energy technologies in order to address climate change. Recently governments have also adopted protectionist measures in low-carbon energy technology sectors. In the solar photovoltaic industry, governments in both Europe and the United States responded to a rise in Chinese module exports through the imposition of tariffs, voluntary export restraints and other measures. The government in Japan, however - another major solar market - has not done so. We hypothesize that the position of firms in global value chains shape their...

Salient Green: Business Power and Trade Policy Responses to Chinese Solar Imports

Llewelyn Hughes
Jonas Meckling
2015

Markets for renewable energy technologies have globalized rapidly over the past decade. At the same time, a series of bilateral and multilateral trade disputes have emerged in solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind technologies. The emergence of these disputes is puzzling. Renewable industries are increasingly dispersed globally, tying domestic firms into global value chains, reducing the economic gains from protection and undercutting industry support. Why, then, have governments in the European Union and the United States pursued trade remedies? In this paper we focus on the solar...

Slicing Up Global Value Chains: A Micro View

Jyrki Ali-Yrkkö
Petri Rouvinen
2015

Global value chains, GVCs, have had a transformative impact on the world economy since the early 1990s. We study 45 specific GVCs with company-confidential invoice-level data. We find that the case companies’ headquartering functions capture a large share of the overall value added, 27 % on average. The value added shares of other functions are as follows: distribution 21 %, final assembly 16 %, and logistics 5 %. The remaining 30 % of the value added goes to vendors. Upon considering value added by country, we find that the home economy’s share is 47 % on average. This share is reduced...

The Politics of Commoditization in Global ICT Industries: A Political Economy Explanation of the Rise of Apple, Google, and Industry Disruptors

Kenji E. Kushida
2015

The global Information and Communications Technologies industry has experienced a rapid, radical reorganization of industry leaders and business models—most recently in mobile. New players Apple and Google abruptly redefined the industry, bringing a wave of commoditization to carriers and equipment manufacturers. Technologies, corporate strategies, and industry structures are usually the first places to look when explaining these industry disruptions, but this paper argues that it was actually a set of political bargains during initial phases of telecommunications liberalization, which...

Awaiting the Second Big Data Revolution: From Digital Noise to Value Creation

Mark Huberty
2015

"Big data"—the collection of vast quantities of data about individual behavior via online, mobile, and other data-driven services—has been heralded as the agent of a third industrial revolution—one with raw materials measured in bits, rather than tons of steel or barrels of oil. Yet the industrial revolution transformed not just how firms made things, but the fundamental approach to value creation in industrial economies. To date, big data has not achieved this distinction. Instead, today’s successful big data business models largely use data to scale old modes of value creation, rather...

Digital Disruption and its Social Impacts

Martin Kenney
Petri Rouvinen
John Zysman
2015

Deepening digitalization and globalization has induced an ongoing societal transformation that may ultimately prove to be as significant as the original industrial revolution. Even as the ICT industry is being restructured, global competition is being transformed. Previously dominant firms—including telecommunications carriers, equipment providers, and powerful legacy software firms—are under assault from the move to cloud computing, in the network center, and mobile computing, on the network periphery. This transformation of the computing and communication infrastructure has been...

Regional Identity Can Add Value to Agricultural Products

Bradley C. Christensen
Martin Kenney
Donald Patton
2015

Regional identity creation is being recognized for its economic benefits and as a strategic resource for producer communities. A regional identity is not a brand; it is built through a complicated process of developing cohesion and sharing in the industry community and communicating outside the industry community to opinion-makers and consumers. The California fine wine industry has built successful regional identities and leveraged them to add value to their wines. As regional identities in the wine industry have strengthened, so has the industry, and a symbiotic relationship with...

Responding to uncertainty: syndication partner choice by foreign venture capital firms in China

Xiao Huang
Martin Kenney
Donald Patton
2015

Cross-border venture capital investment has grown dramatically. Drawing upon observations about the liability of foreignness, previous research has shown that foreign venture capitalists (VCs) tend to partner with local VCs in order to offset information asymmetry and the liabilities of foreignness. Much of the literature has suggested that local VCs should help reduce operational uncertainty. This paper examines syndication partner choice in China, which today is likely the most uncertain environment in which foreign VCs operate on a large scale. This provides an ideal environment...

Winning Coalitions for Climate Policy: How Industrial Policy Builds Support for Carbon Regulation

Jonas Meckling
Nina Kelsey
Eric Biber
John Zysman
2015

The gap is wide between the implications of climate science and the achievements of climate policy. Natural sciences tell us with increasing certainty that climate change is real, dangerous, and solvable; social sciences report that key constituencies largely support action. But current and planned policy remains weak and will allow a long-term increase in temperature of 3.6°C (1). How can we address the gap between science and policy? From the political successes of climate policy leaders, we identify key strategies for building winning coalitions for...