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Place names, or toponyms, provide insight into the initial geographical characteristics of settlements. We present a unique dataset of 3,705 German toponyms that includes the date of the first historical record mentioning the settlement and the date it was granted city rights. We show that the frequency of geographical toponyms as well as a novel proxy for local geographical advantage lead to a city-size distribution that adheres to Zipf’s law. In addition, we use the toponymical information to identify 168 geographical characteristics and empirically examine their importance for modern urban growth. Our results show that settlements with names referring to rivers, fords, churches, hills and historical clearing activities are associated with higher levels of 1910 population compared to places without named geographical characteristics. In addition, we show that the role of some of these characteristics in explaining urban development changes over time. We find for instance that proximity to castles matters more for initial settlement growth than trade capabilities, and highlight the evolving significance of shifting from defensive geography towards water-based trade over time.

Research on the location choice of foreign direct investment (FDI) focuses on the choice between countries. The within-country location choice is either not analyzed at all or restricted to greenfield investments only. The majority of FDI, however, takes the form of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). We develop and test a pair of hypotheses regarding location-target selection for both cross-border and national M&As across the United States, expecting differences in line with the liability of foreignness argument. Using a detailed firm-level data set for M&As in the period 1985–2012, we compare location choices of cross-border versus national M&As. We find that cross-border M&As are more spatially concentrated, and tend to sort into larger agglomerations than national M&As. This finding holds both for urban agglomerations in isolation, as well as for agglomerations that take the economic geography of the United States into account.

The behavioral approach to leadership, which has introduced leadership styles, has been of great importance to the leadership field. Despite its importance, scholars have recently argued and demonstrated that these styles have various conceptual, methodological, and empirical limitations that could hamper further development of the leadership field. Consequently, they have called for alternative approaches to study leadership. We argue that taking a configurational or person-oriented approach to leadership behavior, which focuses on ideal-type configurations of leadership behaviors to identify leadership archetypes, offers such an alternative. We demonstrate the potential of such an approach via the use of archetypal analysis, for a dataset of 46 behaviors across 6 leadership styles, including more than 150,000 respondents. Our results offer a clear indication for the existence of archetypes of leadership. We also suggest how the resulting archetypes can get a meaningful interpretation, and discuss implications for future research.

We conduct a management intervention study in order to study the relation between management quality and firm performance in the Netherlands. The intervention has the form of a management training, specifically developed for the intervention. This training is targeted at managers from firms from the manufacturing and construction industry located in the 3 northern provinces of the Netherlands.