Firm Governance and Strategy in the Institution Context.
Essay question – How does the institutional context of a country affect the firms that are homed in that country?
Set out the argument that institutions of a country matter for economic growth.
Analyse data on institutional quality to support your statement. Choose a firm in a particular Variety of Capitalism in a particular institutional context of one country. This can be a developed country or an emerging market country.
Analyse the Variety of capitalism of your chosen country. Analyse the firm’s strategies and governance. Relate the firm’s strategies and governance to the Variety of capitalism and institutions in the firm’s home country.
Your long essay should be 2,500 words long excluding tables, charts, references. It is due in January 2022 – exact date to be confirmed.
Detailed structure of how your long essay should be set out:
Outline what the key institutions underlying economic growth are and 500 words summarising the debate why institutions are important for economic growth and which ones are important.
Pick a country developed (can be either LME or CME) or emerging market.
Do some research on its institutions think about its PRs, legal system, nature of its state whether there are constraints on the state in the form of freedom of press, independence of judiciary, lack of separation between the executive legislative and judiciary etc.
You may need to look for articles in the press eg The Economist, The Guardian for comments on freedom of press, independence of judiciary. There are some articles on QMplus on China.
Use the various databases (see Bibliography at end of Lecture 6) eg World Bank Doing Business, World Bank Governance Indicators, World Economic Forum, Global Competitiveness Index, Transparency International, Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedoms to give some indicators of its institutions. Are they good/poor?
What can you say about them can you be critical of the measures are they an accurate reflection, do they embody biases in their collection.
You will need to choose a comparator country for your main country in order for you to be able to make assessments and draw conclusions. Note: If your main country is a developed nation, choose a developing/emerging country as your comparator (eg if your essay is about the UK, good comparator countries are China, Russia, India, Brazil etc).
If your main country is a developing/emerging nation, please choose a developed country as your comparator country (eg if your essay is about Russia, you can choose any of the OECD countries as a comparator). This material is covered in weeks 6, 8 and 11.
Analyse your main country’s Variety of Capitalism specifically, the labour market institutions and corporate governance institutions of your country.
Find some data or bits of information relating to VoC eg employment protection and worker participation, training, trade unions, shareholding structure, use of the stock market or banks, business groups.
Again, use different databases. This material is covered in weeks 1-3.
Choose a company in your country. You can pick one of our case study companies to reflect on the corporate governance crises and how they are linked to the country institutions.
From the Milhaupt and Pistor cases, you could choose Mannesmann and VW for Germany; Enron, Amazon and Ford for USA; Yukos for Russia; China Oil Aviation for China. We looked at some case studies on Volkwagen and Amazon you could build on that.
However, students can and are encouraged to explore new cases as well. You can use your knowledge developed on companies from other modules. Students who demonstrate originality and motivation to analyse other cases than the ones studied in class will be rewarded.
See what you can find about their ownership are they privately-held or listed on the stock market; where do they raise their finance from self-financing, banks, stock market. What kind of skills and training do they provide.
Is there anything on the length of employees’ tenure or is there rapid turnover. How is wage bargaining done is there involvement of the union.
Are there strikes or are industrial relations peaceful. Is there worker participation. This material is covered in weeks 4 and 5.
