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\"Every woman would kill for one ... Manhattan fashionista Kelly Quinn thought she'd left her upstate New York town far behind ... until the Seventh Avenue expat returns home to revamp her grandmother's consignment shop into an upscale boutique--and unwittingly sets a trend for murder ... After her rising career as a Manhattan buyer is derailed, Kelly has mixed feelings about relocating back to Lucky Cove, in spite of her big plans for the soon-to-be-renamed Curated by Kelly Resale Boutique. What's left of her luck starts running out when a customer puts on a black lace dress that triggers visions of someone being murdered. As if the haunted \"Murder Dress\" isn't enough to kill business, the psychic's doppelganger cousin has just been found bludgeoned to death. Was Maxine LeMoyne the real target or was it a case of mistaken murder? With some creepy pre-Halloween bargain hunters walking the night and Kelly suddenly a person of interest, a second murder rocks the close-knit town. Now Kelly could be the one who ends up talking to dead people when she's stalked by a killer determined to take her out in high style . . .\"--Publisher.

The work assesses this economic actor in the programmatic documents of the last three Party Congresses. It starts with some data that characterise the Cuban entrepreneurial system at the end of 2023. After this, it very briefly looks at the document Economic and Social Guidelines of the Party and the Revolution (hereafter, Guidelines) that came out of the VI Party Congress, the foundational document of the so-called process of updating the Cuban economic model. The next two sections open with a balance of the contributions and limitations of the Conceptualization of the Cuban Economic and Social Model of Socialist Development (hereafter Conceptualization) related to state-owned enterprises. Subsequently, other documents related to the ‘implementation’ of the Conceptualization are discussed. Finally it includes some ideas, the result of collective work, for transforming the management and the performance of this economic actor, in the midst of a critical situation that requires increasing the country’s entrepreneurial capacity, stabilising the macroeconomy, and embarking on the necessary and difficult path towards a productive reconstruction.

\"This book examines whether international agreements between non-state actors can be identified as a source of international law using objective criteria. It asks whether, beyond Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, there is a system of rules, processes, beliefs or semantics by which these agreements can be objectively identified as a source of international law. Departing from the more usual state-centric analysis, it adopts postmodern legal positivism as its analytical tool. This allows for the reality that international law-making takes place in subjective social landscapes. To test the effectiveness of this approach, it is applied to agreements between petroleum agencies and corporations which allow two or more states to exploit disputed resources across boundaries looking in particular at arrangements involving China, Vietnam and the Philippines. By so doing it illustrates an alternative way that states can manage disputes, without having to resort to conflict. It will appeal to both scholars and practitioners of public international law, as well as civil servants.\"-- Provided by publisher.

Research Summary State‐owned enterprises (SOEs) are often more opaque than other types of firms. This opaqueness tends to generate resistance when SOEs undertake cross‐border acquisitions. Opaqueness can also aggravate concerns about an SOE's semipolitical nature and its susceptibility to agency problems, making gaining legitimacy harder. Data on attempted foreign acquisitions by Chinese firms were analyzed to compare the likelihood of deal completion between SOEs and firms with other forms of ownership. The SOEs' completion rate was 14% lower than that of other firms. Their disadvantage was shown to be alleviated when they could provide credible signals by being publicly listed (though only on an exchange in a well‐developed economy or by hiring reputable auditors). We also find that the disadvantage of SOEs was partially mediated by their opaqueness. Managerial Summary Opaqueness, or lack of transparency, is critical in many business transactions. In this article, we argue that the concept of opaqueness can help us understand why SOEs tend to have a lower likelihood of deal completion in cross‐border acquisitions. Our evidence suggests that opaqueness influences the relationship between state ownership and deal completion, and firms can improve their chance of success in cross‐border acquisitions by providing credible information, such as by listing on an exchange in a developed market or hiring a reputable auditor. These help mitigate the hazard of opaqueness.

Thirteen million people in the United States--roughly one in ten workers--own a business. And yet rates of business ownership among African Americans are much lower and have been so throughout the twentieth century. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, businesses owned by African Americans tend to have lower sales, fewer employees and smaller payrolls, lower profits, and higher closure rates. In contrast, Asian American-owned businesses tend to be more successful. In Race and Entrepreneurial Success, minority entrepreneurship authorities Robert Fairlie and Alicia Robb examine racial disparities in business performance. Drawing on the rarely used, restricted-access Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) dataset compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, Fairlie and Robb examine in particular why Asian-owned firms perform well in comparison to white-owned businesses and black-owned firms typically do not. They also explore the broader question of why some entrepreneurs are successful and others are not.. After providing new comprehensive estimates of recent trends in minority business ownership and performance, the authors examine the importance of human capital, financial capital, and family business background in successful business ownership. They find that a high level of startup capital is the most important factor contributing to the success of Asian-owned businesses, and that the lack of startup money for black businesses (attributable to the fact that nearly half of all black families have less than $6,000 in total wealth) contributes to their relative lack of success. In addition, higher education levels among Asian business owners explain much of their success relative to both white- and African American-owned businesses. Finally, Fairlie and Robb find that black entrepreneurs have fewer opportunities than white entrepreneurs to acquire valuable pre-business work experience through working in family businesses.

Private equity firms have long been at the center of public debates on the impact of the financial sector on Main Street companies. Are these firms financial innovators that save failing businesses or financial predators that bankrupt otherwise healthy companies and destroy jobs? The first comprehensive examination of this topic,Private Equity at Workprovides a detailed yet accessible guide to this controversial business model. Economist Eileen Appelbaum and Professor Rosemary Batt carefully evaluate the evidence-including original case studies and interviews, legal documents, bankruptcy proceedings, media coverage, and existing academic scholarship-to demonstrate the effects of private equity on American businesses and workers. They document that while private equity firms have had positive effects on the operations and growth of small and mid-sized companies and in turning around failing companies, the interventions of private equity more often than not lead to significant negative consequences for many businesses and workers. Prior research on private equity has focused almost exclusively on the financial performance of private equity funds and the returns to their investors.Private Equity at Workprovides a new roadmap to the largely hidden internal operations of these firms, showing how their business strategies disproportionately benefit the partners in private equity firms at the expense of other stakeholders and taxpayers. In the 1980s, leveraged buyouts by private equity firms saw high returns and were widely considered the solution to corporate wastefulness and mismanagement. And since 2000, nearly 11,500 companies-representing almost 8 million employees-have been purchased by private equity firms. As their role in the economy has increased, they have come under fire from labor unions and community advocates who argue that the proliferation of leveraged buyouts destroys jobs, causes wages to stagnate, saddles otherwise healthy companies with debt, and leads to subsidies from taxpayers. Appelbaum and Batt show that private equity firms' financial strategies are designed to extract maximum value from the companies they buy and sell, often to the detriment of those companies and their employees and suppliers. Their risky decisions include buying companies and extracting dividends by loading them with high levels of debt and selling assets. These actions often lead to financial distress and a disproportionate focus on cost-cutting, outsourcing, and wage and benefit losses for workers, especially if they are unionized. Because the law views private equity firms as investors rather than employers, private equity owners are not held accountable for their actions in ways that public corporations are. And their actions are not transparent because private equity owned companies are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Thus, any debts or costs of bankruptcy incurred fall on businesses owned by private equity and their workers, not the private equity firms that govern them. For employees this often means loss of jobs, health and pension benefits, and retirement income. Appelbaum and Batt conclude with a set of policy recommendations intended to curb the negative effects of private equity while preserving its constructive role in the economy. These include policies to improve transparency and accountability, as well as changes that would reduce the excessive use of financial engineering strategies by firms. A groundbreaking analysis of a hotly contested business model,Private Equity at Workprovides an unprecedented analysis of the little-understood inner workings of private equity and of the effects of leveraged buyouts on American companies and workers. This important new work will be a valuable resource for scholars, policymakers, and the informed public alike.

Despite the remarkable economic growth, China maintains a large-scale State economy comprised of extensive State-owned enterprises (SOEs) that continue to play a dominant role in the national economy. In spite of this, China has been substantially restructuring its State economy in its long-lasting SOE reforms since 1978, and the fourth round of the reforms commenced in 2013. China's expanding geopolitical influence and escalating Sino-Western tensions warrant an in-depth examination of its genuine State economy reform objective and process. Based on comprehensive analyses of relevant laws and policies of China's major State economy restructuring programs promoted in the second and the latest round of the reforms, this study firstly demonstrates SOE's well-established primacy in China's political-economic system. This study argues that since the mid-1990s, the restructuring reforms implemented by successive Chinese governments for the State economy have promoted the 'Grasp the Large and Release the Small' pseudo-privatisation. The policy continuity speaks to a goal that successive Chinese leaders have sought to achieve-'the State advances, the private sector retreats'.

The relationship between corporate giving and corporate financial performance has remained inconclusive after decades of research. This study advances our understanding by contending that stakeholders may react differently to a firm’s various levels of corporate philanthropic giving. The relationship between corporate giving and firm performance could be better captured using an S-curve shape in that either a low or high level of corporate giving will reduce, while a moderate level of corporate giving will increase, firm performance. We further examine the moderating effects of firm ownership and regional development. We contend that stakeholders may have higher expectations for the social performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) versus private-owned enterprises (POEs), resulting in a lower performance effect for SOEs with the same amount of corporate giving. Similarly, stakeholders in developed regions are also likely to have higher expectations for corporate giving, leading to a lower performance effect for the same level of corporate giving. Analyses of listed firms in China during the period from 2003 to 2013 support our thesis.

Research summary: Although the middle management literature has identified various bridging roles performed by middle managers in the market environment, it is relatively vague about whether and how they manage the political environment to achieve market-related goals. In an inductive field study of four large state-owned enterprises based in mainland Communist China, operational middle managers were found to take an active role in dealing with political actors to achieve market efficiency in their local environments, performing two distinct bridging strategies. Our field study suggests that middle managers are better equipped than their bosses (top executives) as well as their subordinates (frontline employees) to perform the bridging function between competing market and political imperatives in various local settings. Managerial summary: For firms that operate in diverse geographies, it is challenging for a handful of top executives to deal with numerous political actors. This burden could be shared with operational middle managers, who play a bridging role by drawing on their operational knowledge and local networks. Our research on middle managers who work under the scrutiny of political actors in China found that they bridge market and political ideology by conveying common features that seem legitimate to both. They also bridge market goals and political actors with personal affect. Compared to top executives and frontline employees, middle managers have unique advantages in performing these bridging functions. Firms can enhance their strategy execution ability by training middle managers in dealing with political actors in diverse contexts.