Abhisekh Ghosh Moulick’s research while affiliated with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and other places

All-or-nothing necessary conditions are critical for the unfolding of subsequent entrepreneurial outcomes. A condition is necessary when an entrepreneurial outcome emerges only in the presence or absence of that condition. While a necessary condition does not guarantee the outcome, it makes the outcome possible by virtue of its theoretical necessity. We discuss the philosophical roots and importance of necessary conditions in entrepreneurship. We offer an empirical illustration of necessary condition analysis using founder’s experience, a critical concept in entrepreneurship. We argue that theory-method compatibility in entrepreneurship research can be enhanced by explicitly accounting for necessary conditions.

Emerging evidence suggests that there is a meaningful link between overseas experience and entrepreneurial activity. However, we find very limited inquiry at the individual-level into why cross-cultural exposure seems to enhance proclivities to engage in entrepreneurship. Drawing from Schema Theory, we argue that breadth of cross-cultural experience cultivates entrepreneurial intentions through the role of alertness—a set of schematic aptitudes for spotting commercial potential. Using a sample of lay individuals from the U.S. (N = 581) with diverse entrepreneurial and overseas experience, we find support for our model. Our findings help explain why cross-cultural experiences can be so impactful for nascent venturing. The greater the diversity of foreign cultural exposure one attains, the greater it expands scanning and search, association and connection, and evaluation and judgment schemata salient to the pursuit of new venture opportunities.

When school districts move more administrators down to school campuses, do they get better at reducing the income-based achievement gap? Data from Texas public school districts between 1994 and 2010 show that such managerial decentralization is positively associated with income-based achievement gap, explained by the tendency of elite capture in heavily decentralized systems. Furthermore, this primary relationship was moderated positively by the level of school district revenue generated locally and moderated negatively by enrollment. Generally beneficial among larger student bodies, more decentralized management, especially in districts with a greater ability to generate their own revenue, made the achievement gap worse.

We examine how shifting resource dependencies influence compensation strategy during commercial transitions within entrepreneurial nonprofits. Analyzing a longitudinal sample of 4732 organizations, we show how compensation strategies shift non-linearly as nonprofits transition from contributed resource dependence to market-based resource dependence. Dynamic quadratic models unveil a dual threshold of commercialization concerning this transition. Nonprofits at moderate stages of commercialization contend with competing dependencies from both contributed and market-based sources, resulting in a decrease in compensation spending and an increase in part-time employment. At higher stages, contributed resource dependence is eclipsed by market-based dependence, reflected in increasing compensation spending and full-time employment.

Aggregated country-level statistics and regulatory aspects of institutions alone fail to explain the increasing emergence of promising ventures in developing contexts. We argue institutions have multiple dimensions and draw attention to the often overlooked heterogeneities within these institutional dimensions in developing nations. Using data from developed, emerging, and base of pyramid economies we show evidence of unequal endowments across regulatory, cognitive, and normative institutional dimensions. Drawing on exemplar ventures we then illustrate that some founders develop workarounds by compensating for the weaker institutional dimension/s. Thus, rather than waiting for weak institutions to be fixed, entrepreneurial catalyzers go forward by harnessing their weak institutional context, countering a common narrative in development research.

Drawing upon transaction costs economics, we examine the determinants of the two-stage allocation process within the local United Way (UW) system. We use a unique multiyear data set that captures local UW allocations to nonprofit grantees at four points in time (2000, 2004, 2008, and 2010). We find that the first stage is screening, in which organizations’ legitimacy, mission, and financial performance are preliminary determinants of partnership in the UW system. In the second stage, UWs incentivize existing grantees with high legitimacy to stay in the system through larger allocation share. These determinants are stable over time. However, size of these effects varies across size of UW system; this finding suggests that transaction costs influence the likelihood of using performance measures to evaluate grantees in the first stage of the allocation process.

While organizational systems are associated with innovation and adaptability, interorganizational relationships may be predisposed to stability. Using multinomial logit analysis, we test how resource dependencies affect system stability in local United Way (UW) systems between 2000 and 2010. We find strong support for the resource dependence argument (Pfeffer and Salancik 2003). United Ways (UW) are less likely to drop larger, powerful partners that are strong fundraising partners. However, powerful, long-term partners not contributing to the strategic objectives of the UW system are more likely to experience a decrease in allocations. While powerful resource partners may capture the UW, UWs systems continue to change through the addition of new partners and the re-allocation of resources among long-term partners. However, context also affects the capacity for change. Larger UWs are more likely to add new partners and less likely to keep long-term partners.

Some scholars equate fiscal slack with organizational inefficiency, while others argue that it is a useful environmental buffer. This study takes the first step in reconciling these opposing views, by classifying fiscal slack as absorbed and unabsorbed slack in public organizations. In a sample of 1,000 Texas public school districts over 17 years, fund balance (unabsorbed fiscal slack) does not seem to affect student performance, unless there is a major downward budget shock. In the absence of a negative budget shock, non-instructional spending per pupil (absorbed fiscal slack) has a negative impact on performance change in an average school district, but no meaningful impact on student performance during a major budget shock.