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date: 15 February 2019

Abstract and Keywords

The ubiquity and diversity of business groups make the study of this institution fascinating. Conceptually, this hybrid organizational form between firm and market can shed new light on the theory of the firm and its boundaries. This article attempts to make three contributions to the literature on business groups. The first is motivated by the view that the diversity of business groups around the world is due to the diversity of the underlying conditions leading to their formation. The second contribution of the study is the presentation of new stylized data and evidence on several facets of business groups that go beyond the existing literature. The third contribution of this study is to question some of the conventional wisdom in the literature. The rest of this article is organized around the taxonomy of business groups around the world.

Keywords: business groups, literature, firm, market, taxonomy

Tarun Khanna

Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School, United States, where he has studied companies and organizations in emerging markets worldwide since 1993. His book Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping their Futures, and Yours, was published in 2008 by Harvard Business Press, and has been translated into several languages. In 2007 he was elected a Young Global Leader (under 40) by the World Economic Forum. In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of International Business. He serves on several publicly traded and privately held corporate boards, mentors start‐up ventures, and volunteers time with non‐profits, especially in Asia.

Yishay Yafeh

Yishay Yafeh is Associate Professor at the School of Business Administration, The Hebrew University, Israel, and Research Fellow at Centre of Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI). He is co-author (with Paolo Mauro and Nathan Sussman) of Emerging Markets and Financial Globalization: Sovereign Bond Spreads in 1870-1913 and Today (Oxford University Press, 2006). He has published in many journals, including Journal of Finance, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Economic Journal, Joural of Business, and Journal of Industrial Economics.

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