This thesis examines the process by which innovative new products come to be accepted and adopted in the marketplace. As these products are inherently uncertain and not readily accepted and adopted, market intermediaries play an important role in the validation and subsequent diffusion of...

How people assess their prospects and act accordingly is anchored in time and space. But context is only half the story. Human beings share predispositions in favour of the here and now, discounting the future, and risk aversion. This paper provides a framework for integrating cognition with...

Where there was a settled political geography of state power and responsibilities, the remarkable growth of global finance has put enormous pressure on national economic, political and social institutions. Furthermore, the looming crisis facing many continental European social security systems...

If its prospects were doubted in the early 1990s, London is now the pre-eminent international financial centre. It dominates its European rivals and is joined with New York and Tokyo in a non-stop reciprocal global embrace. Whereas some analysts approach this topic concentrating on the nature...

Scandals of corporate governance in the United States and Europe in the aftermath of the TMT bubble captured the public imagination. In play were the interests of senior executives in relation to investors, prompting debate over countries' standards of corporate governance in the global market...

European integration has prompted great interest in the adjustment capacities of small and medium enterprises in regions characterized by high levels of unemployment and lower-than-average incomes. At issue, in these circumstances, is the extent to which economic competitiveness can be enhanced...

The persistence of relatively high unemployment rates in certain regions of many western industrial countries is well-established. These problems have been acknowledged, in part, in macro-economic labour market policies and also in regional economic development programmes. The paper re-examines...

Adoption of international and U.S. financial accounting standards by leading German corporations presages a new era in European capital markets, with important implications for the design and management of German supplementary pensions. In this paper, we first introduce financial accounting...

Believed to be a robust alternative to Anglo-American market capitalism, the virtues of the German model are increasingly disputed as doubts are raised about its long-term prospects. At the core of the German model is a system of corporate governance that is characterized by concentrated...