Abstract While prominent differences in corporate governance exist across the Asia Pacific region, there are common concerns about controlling shareholders expropriating wealth from minority shareholders at the expense of overall wealth creation, as well as about the roles and qualifications of managers in Asian companies. The contributors to this Special Issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management address these concerns and provide new evidence on their empirical relevance, as well as the factors conditioning that relevance. They also provide cautionary insight into the merits of specific proposals to reform Asian corporate governance. An important theme emerging from this Special Issue is that one needs to understand the institutional framework in which organizations operate in order to understand the We thank Saturna Capital Corporation and Nick Kaiser (Director and Chairman) for financial support that made possible our Special Issue Conference held in Vancouver in October 2009. We also thank all the authors and reviewers, whose work turned this Special Issue from editors ’ vision into reality. We are grateful to Rosalie Tung for delivering a keynote speech at the conference, as well as to Mick Carney, Tom Roehl, and Jongwook Kim for invigorating the discussions of papers presented at the conference. Phil

Acquisition research has traditionally been dominated by economic and atomistic assumptions. This study extends acquisition research by integrating behavioral learning and social network perspectives to examine the acquisitions of alliance partners. Specifically, we examine, at the dyadic level, how firms ’ alliance learning approaches (exploration versus exploitation) and their joint and relative embeddedness in alliance networks (joint brokerage positions and relative centrality) can interact to drive subsequent acquisitions of alliance partners. Our analyses of the U.S. computer industry support our theoretical framework, highlighting the unique and previously underexplored behavioral and relational drivers of acquisitions. Alliances and acquisitions are two important organizational activities for accessing external resources (Wang & Zajac, 2007). Although the literature generally treats them as parallel in nature, firms often acquire alliance partners (Folta & Miller, 2002; Porrini, 2004; Zollo & Reuer, 2010). Then, what drives acquisitions of alliance partners? Prior research has primarily relied on economic or financial explanations such as transaction costs, agency conflicts, and real options (Folta & Miller, 2002; Hagedoorn & Sadowski, 1999; Kogut, 1991), and paid relatively little attention to behavioral and network drivers. A stream of recent work has increasingly recognized that firms often draw on behavioral learning to make acquisition decisions

Abstract CEO duality, organizational slack, and ownership types have been found to affect firm performance in China. However, existing work has largely focused on their direct relationships with firm performance. Advancing this research, we develop an integrative framework to address an important and previously underexplored question: How do CEO duality and organizational slack affect the performance of firms with different ownership types? Specifically, we compare the moderating effects of CEO duality on the relationship between organizational slack and firm performance in China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private-owned enterprises (POEs). Findings suggest that there is a positive relationship between organizational slack and firm performance, and that CEO duality negatively moderates this relationship in SOEs, but positively in POEs.

Abstract Few scholars would dispute the argument that mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are different in China and the United States, but we know little about how they differ. This article reports one of the first studies that systematically compares and contrasts how M&As differ in these two countries. While prior research on M&As tends to emphasize economic and financial explanations while treating firms as atomistic actors severed from their institutional and network relations, we develop a new theoretical framework based on relational, behavioral, and institutional perspectives. We not only consider firms as learning actors embedded in network relations, but also compare and contrast their M&A patterns between China and the United States, two distinctive institutional contexts. We find that both a firm’s structural hole position and its learning orientation (exploration/exploitation) in alliances have direct and joint impacts on subsequent M&As. Further, such impacts differ across the two countries, due to their institutional disparities.

Abstract This paper explores principal-principal conflicts in corporate governance during times of economic crisis. We address the question: What external and internal governance mechanisms can best protect minority shareholders? Drawing on 877 publicly listed large corporations with concentrated ownership in seven Asian countries and regions, we compare different control structures between family firms and non-family firms during crisis. We find that family firms tend to choose certain control structures associated with potential principal-principal conflicts. However, these choices can be constrained by external and internal governance mechanisms. Specifically, legal institutions and presence of multiple blockholders serve as useful external and internal governance mechanisms, respectively, to constrain potential expropriation of minority shareholders. Keywords Principal-principal conflicts. Crisis. Corporate governance. Family ownership Instead of traditional principal-agent conflicts espoused in most research dealing with developed economies, principal-principal conflicts have been identified as a major concern of corporate governance in emerging economies (Young, Peng,

SSRN Working Paper

This paper investigates whether stock markets view Chinese OMAs as increasing shareholder wealth. The subject is of interest given the influential role that the government plays in Chinese firms ’ overseas activities, and the fact that the government may have objectives other than maximization of shareholder wealth. We examine 145 OMAs by Chinese acquiring firms over the year 1994-2008. We find some evidence that markets positively responded to news of Chinese OMAs. However, we also find that markets responded less favorably after China implemented its Go Global policy encouraging overseas investment. We hypothesize two reasons for this: First, the expansion of OMAs under Go Global resulted in Chinese firms pursuing less attractive targets, on average. Second, Go Global re-directed investment towards industries having national strategic value but diminished profit value. Using a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition procedure, we find no evidence to support this latter hypothesis. Thus, to whatever extent strategic interests may motivate China’s Go Global policy, it does not appear that their pursuit has come at the expense of shareholder wealth.

Are family ownership and control in large firms good,

Kansas City. His research interests are business models, entrepreneurial firm growth and financing,

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