Past research on labour-market skills shortages indicates that employers report skills shortages or hard-to-fill vacancies for a variety of different reasons. Nevertheless, there is some consensus that skills-shortages analysis needs to examine such shortages within the context of the local...

This paper examines factors that influence the propensity of a firm to take up external business support using random effects nominal probit regression analysis to capture sector heterogeneity. The results suggest a strong positive association between the orientation of the firm towards growth...

This paper investigates whether any pattern of convergence of international earnings-to-price ratios that exist for a sample of 19 European Union (EU) countries over the period 1994-2012 can be detected through the methodology of Phillips and Sul (2007). This methodology is based on a general...

The simple mechanics of capital budgeting decision techniques are complicated by presence of mutual exclusion, project contingencies, differing risk levels, and unequal lives. This paper examines another such complexity virtually ignored by financial management textbooks but present in virtually...

We assess the effect of four short-sale constraints on stock returns in isolation and in combination, in generally falling versus generally rising markets, and considering relative effects for large/mid-cap versus small/micro-cap firms. There is substantial evidence that our more fully specified...

This paper presents a synthesized model explaining the returns of short-sale constrained stocks. We combine short-sale constraints that were previously treated individually or in pairs into a more fully specified model. The model is also specified in generally falling versus generally rising...