Stockholm School of Economics

We study optimal price setting by a monopolist in an infinite horizon model with stochastic costs, moderate inflation, and costly price adjustment. For realistic parameters, chosen to replicate observed frequencies of price changes, the model fits numerically several empirical regularities. In particular, price reductions are larger but less frequent than price increases, and prices respond considerably faster to cost increases than to cost decreases. The associated kink in the steady state short-run Phillips curve implies that the output loss associated with a small negative in‡ation surprise is about twice as large as the output gain associated with a small positive inflation surprise.

When crises strike, new forms of emergent organizing often arise to address urgent societal needs that formal institutions struggle to meet. Among these, emergent response groups (ERGs)—self-organized communities that form to respond to unexpected and extreme events—offer a particularly salient example of decentralized and nonhierarchical organizing. This multicase study investigates eight ERGs that formed during the COVID-19 pandemic to design and distribute critical medical supplies. Drawing on sensemaking theory, we show how bricolage—making do with at-hand resources—supports coordination and community structuring by reducing equivocality caused by distributed actors. Our findings describe how these ERGs grew rapidly by using bricolage to reduce action, goal, and resource equivocality, enabling coordinated and scalable crisis response efforts. We contribute to research on emergent organizing in crisis contexts by revealing how bricolage fosters coherence and rapid scaling in the absence of formal hierarchies. Our study also challenges the dominant assumption that bricolage is inherently limiting to organizational growth, showing that—in the context of self-organizing collectives—it offers a novel solution to the problem of coordinating action among distributed agents.

Climate change and biodiversity loss are widely recognized as the two most pressing environmental challenges of our era. Yet, while climate change has spurred extensive corporate attention and concrete action, biodiversity loss remains comparatively neglected in business agendas despite its profound ecological and economic implications. This paper investigates whether public attention to biodiversity risk can raise corporate executives’ awareness of this issue. Using a dataset of 49,516 conference call transcripts from 1,938 European-listed firms between 2012 and 2023, we examine the presence, content, and tone of biodiversity-related discussions as a proxy for executive awareness. Public attention is measured through country-level Google search volumes for “biodiversity” (and its linguistic equivalents), complemented by alternative measures such as the New York Times biodiversity news index.We find a significantly positive association between public attention and the likelihood that executives discuss biodiversity during conference calls. These results are robust to controls for climate-related attention, natural disasters, and potential endogeneity addressed through instrumental variable estimations. Moreover, heightened public attention reduces executives’ reliance on symbolic or vague biodiversity statements, suggesting a shift toward more substantive communication under greater scrutiny. Cross-sectional analyses show that the effect of public attention is more pronounced among profitable firms, firms in resource-intensive industries, and firms adopting sustainability practices such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) or external assurance of sustainability reports.However, we find no evidence that increased biodiversity awareness translates into tangible corporate actions, such as adjustments in capital expenditures, operating expenses, or SG&A costs. Nor does heightened biodiversity attention spill over to broader environmental discussions; instead, biodiversity discourse appears to substitute for other environmental topics within the time constraints of earnings calls.Overall, our results underscore the crucial but limited role of public attention: while it raises executives’ awareness and enhances the quality of biodiversity-related communication, it does not by itself drive corporate investment in biodiversity protection. This highlights both the potential and the limitations of public attention as a governance mechanism, pointing to the need for complementary regulatory and institutional measures to translate awareness into action.

Abstract This conceptual article argues that the mutual relevance of grand challenges and organization and management studies is best approached phenomenologically. Rather than constituting objects to be theorized or denoting special empirical contexts, grand challenges structure researchers’ attention and shape their interpretations of the processes and systems of deliberation through which collective action is coordinated. From this perspective, grand challenges require researchers to innovate their understandings of deliberation and to ensure that newly generated knowledge is redirected towards management and policymaking. The article integrates the Carnegie School theory of organization with French pragmatic sociology’s theory of justification, or economies of worth , to develop a phenomenological model of situated deliberation that links decision‐making with moral reasoning. This model highlights deliberation’s articulated, evaluative, contestable, and trans‐institutional character, as well as its grounding in the cognitive capacities and sociality of actors and observers – regardless of the scale, scope, or stratification of the underlying coordination problems. Building on this framework, the article advocates that grand challenge researchers adopt the standpoint of entrepreneurial observers : actors anchored by socio‐economic and scientific commitments who envision the integration of previously disjointed social systems of deliberation to orient collective action.

ABSTRACT Forced labor and precarious working conditions are increasingly visible in high‐income economies of the Global North. Mostly perpetrated by the private business sector, immigrant workers are disproportionately affected. However, most management literature has focused on labor exploitation and human rights abuses connected to global supply chains in the Global South. Yet, in industries or activities not easily offshored, low‐cost business models contribute to labor market exploitation in high‐income economies. The ability to implement such models depends on the institutional context as well as corporate capabilities. This insight does not, however, resolve the issue why also democratic welfare societies with strong legal systems see such practices. Using Sweden as a case, we ask what a sociological lens can contribute to our understanding. It suggests that forced labor is an emergent outcome of interlocking market, state, and institutional logics, reinforced by increasingly restrictive migration regimes. Conversely, an appreciation of the business side could inform sociological studies of migration and labor exploitation. Bridging management, sociology, and migration perspectives, this review contributes to the growing recognition that combating modern slavery requires not only better corporate compliance but also a rethinking of the institutional and social foundations upon which contemporary business models depend.

Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice ( ETP ) is committed to advancing transparency, replicability, credibility, and rigor in research. To support this commitment, we encourage authors to preregister their research plans, submit empirical studies as Registered Reports, and engage with our evolving editorial processes, such as Registered Revisions. Drawing on practices across multiple disciplines, we offer guidance for integrating these publication formats into our field. We also provide multiple resources to support authors in adopting these approaches and to address the unique challenges of applying such formats to, for example, secondary data. By more widely embracing the Registered Report approach, we envision a future for entrepreneurship research that is characterized by greater credibility, replicability, transparency, and scientific impact. In this editorial, we motivate and, hopefully, guide future work by making a specific call for manuscripts for a virtual special issue of ETP focused on Registered Reports, strengthening ETP ’s longstanding commitment to methodological innovation. We offer a prospective vision—what we believe would be good for future literature—and our aim is to empower scholars to proactively shape new theoretical and empirical foundations in entrepreneurship research that enhance the credibility and replicability of entrepreneurship research.