Seminar (Dept. of General Management)

Theme：Environmental Uncertainty, Entrepreneurial Governance, and Entrepreneurial Outcome

Speaker：Weiliang Zhang（University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign）

Time：2021-12-16 10:00

Address：Zoom Meeting

Language：Chinese

Venue：Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/83049275863?pwd=S0RDVEJaTDc5dXJDZVVjVUdwMXRGdz09 

Meeting ID：830 4927 5863

Password：343130

ABSTRACT：

Uncertainty is a central construct in the entrepreneurship literature. However, the relationship between environmental uncertainty and entrepreneurial outcome is still underexplored. As the real world becomes increasingly discordant, understanding how environmental uncertainty affects entrepreneurial outcome and how startups can mitigate uncertainty has attracted much attention from both entrepreneurship scholars and entrepreneurs. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper studies two research questions: (1) how different kinds of environmental uncertainty affect entrepreneurial outcome differently? (2) how entrepreneurial governance helps startups mitigate or embrace environmental uncertainty? Integrating theories from management and economics literature, I propose that both macroeconomic uncertainty and economic policy uncertainty negatively affect entrepreneurial outcome, while political uncertainty positively affects entrepreneurial outcome. Informal institutions such as a clan culture can mitigate the negative effects of economic policy uncertainty and amplify the positive effects of political uncertainty. Moreover, firms with fewer shareholders, with institutional shareholders, or without majority-hold shareholder will also be less negatively affected by economic policy uncertainty. Utilizing a novel dataset of over 9 million Chinese firms registered during 2005–2014 and over 246,000 normative documents published by Chinese provincial governments from 2005 to 2018, I found support for my propositions.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY：

Weiliang Zhang is a Ph.D. Student at Gies College of Business, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His current research focuses on digital economy (mobile apps, e-commerce platforms, and social media) and entrepreneurship. Prior to joining academia, he was business vice president of Caixin Globus, a startup co-incubated by Caixin Media Group and ByteDance.