Raveendra Chittoor

Modernizing Without Westernizing: Social Structure and Economic Action in the Indian Financial Sector

In seeking to understand whether the transition by Asian countries to market economies mirrors the path taken by the West, we ask how embedded network ties between equity analysts and the CEOs of the firms they follow in India influence the accuracy of analysts’ earnings forecasts. We contrast traditional institutions of caste and regional language with contemporary institutions such as universities as the locus for such ties. We posit that CEOs from the post-economic-reform generation in India are more likely to transfer material private information via their school ties while pre-reform generation CEOs favor caste or language ties. We then contrast domestic business groups (BGs) with western MNCs as organizational contexts and argue that BGs legitimate the transfer of private information along particularistic ties, whereas MNCs mitigate such transfers. Our conceptual framework is supported by analyses that draw on a sample of 1,552 earnings forecasts issued from 2001 to 2010 by 296 equity analysts. Our findings suggest that the embeddedness perspective should be broadened to incorporate the influence of larger historical social structures within which economic action is embedded, and to view BGs as carriers and repositories that blend modern management practices with particularistic behavioral patterns among top executives.

Demographics and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Germany and India

There is increasing empirical evidence to suggest that the source of economic growth for many nations is entrepreneurial activity (Audretsch and Fritsch, 2003). However, there is still a strong need for empirical support on the various theoretical factors that are hypothesized to foster entrepreneurial activity. With scholars questioning the applicability and validity of theory in global settings, many national level empirical studies are needed in different geographical and cultural contexts. This chapter attempts to examine the empirical evidence on the impact of three critical demographic factors namely, migration, population structure and higher education on entrepreneurial activity, in the cross-cultural context of Germany and India. Germany and India have different levels of entrepreneurial activities (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, 2002). They also share some interesting commonalities and differences in demographics. Some of these commonalities and differences have been associated with entrepreneurship in the literature. These are: migration (Aldrich and Waldinger, 1990; Constant et al., 2004), higher education (Baumol, 2005; Chander and Thangavelu, 2004) and population structure (Wagner and Sternberg, 2004). Hence, it would be interesting to study how these variables have contributed to differences in entrepreneurial activities in the two countries, even though there are many other factors like unemployment, participation of