The role of the entrepreneurial encounter in the emergence of opportunities: Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to explore the conceptual potential of the Deleuzian notion of the encounter in order to better understand the genealogy of opportunities. We adopt a processual perspective of opportunities. In order to translate this notion to the domain of entrepreneurship, we analysed and interpreted Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club. This film follows the creation of the first club in the United States that illegally allowed HIV-positive people to supply themselves with foreign antiretroviral drugs from Mexico or Japan. The article highlights encounters in this process that disturb the entrepreneur’s belief systems and allow him or her to be open to potential opportunity. It finally explores how the encounter may improve our understanding of the political becoming of opportunities within the entrepreneurial process.     

(In)equality and the South African Constitution

ABSTRACT

Does the South African Constitution constrain or empower government, courts and citizens in addressing systemic social and economic inequalities? This article argues that the Constitution is explicitly ‘transformative’, but is an enabling document, providing ‘scaffolding’ for political and legal activities. It is government, strong institutions and civil society that are ultimately responsible for securing its equality aspirations. Here the Constitution admits of different understandings of equality and different economic and social policy choices. This article identifies these contested meanings of equality and suggests that a liberal egalitarian/social democratic version is dominant in policy choices and the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. It illustrates this with reference to the Court’s jurisprudence on equality, and suggests that more radical and transformative interpretations remain possible. However, it concludes that we cannot escape politics, the need for good policy choices and effective implementation and enforcement.     

EU Enlargement and Trade Integration: Lessons from a Gravity Model

The authors estimate gravity models using a large panel of bilateral trade flows across 61 countries between 1980 and 2003, which are applied as a benchmark for the integration of Central and South Eastern European countries with the euro area. They show that a careful examination of the fixed effects of the model is crucial for the proper interpretation of the results. The results suggest that trade integration between most new EU member states and the euro area is already relatively advanced, while the remaining Central and Eastern European countries have significant scope to strengthen trade links with the euro area.     

Judo Strategy: 10 Techniques For Beating A Stronger Opponent

The idea of judo economics, building on analogies with the sport of judo, has been around for at least 20 years. But taking these ideas further to judo strategy means that a framework of strategic principles can be developed to help companies put stronger opponents on the mat.     

The Effect of Earnings–Announcement Timing on Earnings Management

This paper examines whether firms which delay earnings announcements engage in earnings management. The cross–sectional version of the modified Jones 1995 model is used to estimate 'normal' accruals. Prior research has documented that, on average, delayed earnings announcements are associated with negative earnings surprises. Our evidence suggests that the market anticipates unfavorable earnings news when it observes reporting delays. As a consequence, late reporters appear to make the most of a bad situation by employing income–decreasing accruals in big–bath–type earnings management and in contractual renegotiations. We find that the magnitude of income–reducing abnormal accruals is related to the reporting lag.     

Entry and regulation: evidence from health care professions

In many countries, pharmacies receive high regulated markups and are protected from competition through geographic entry restrictions. We develop an empirical entry model for pharmacies and physicians with two features: entry restrictions and strategic complementarities. We find that the entry restrictions have directly reduced the number of pharmacies by more than 50%, and also indirectly reduced the number of physicians by about 7%. A removal of the entry restrictions, combined with a reduction in the regulated markups, would generate a large shift in rents to consumers, without reducing the availability of pharmacies. The public interest motivation for the current regime therefore has no empirical support.     

INDUSTRIAL POLICY IN GREAT BRITAIN AND ITS EFFECT ON TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY IN MANUFACTURING PLANTS, 1990–1998

Industrial policy in any economy has a number of varying and occasionally conflicting objectives, but the overarching intention of the various grants, subsidies and support schemes, arguably, must be to improve the economic performance of the plants they assist directly. However, in the absence of counterfactual evidence, whether or not assistance does improve performance is hard to establish. In this paper, we consider the impact of two UK government industrial support schemes (Regional Selective Assistance and the Small Firm Merit Awards for Research and Technology) on UK manufacturing plant level total factor productivity in an attempt to answer the question, ‘did assistance make a difference?’