__Abstract__ Banks play a crucial role for the financing of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs represent a large fraction of all firms in many economies and contribute significantly to employment and growth. But, SMEs are more informationally opaque, more risky, more financially...

The vertical organization of production entails a range of make-or-buy decisions of intermediate goods that are influenced by the difficulty of writing contracts with a potential supplier. When contracting causes high transaction costs, a firm can decide to vertically integrate the production of...

Business is becoming increasingly international. At the same time, governments are intervening more in the conduct of business. A further development is the growing significance of emerging economies, many of which have a tradition of active government involvement with business. Taken together,...

We analyze the initial intellectual property (IP) right of 4,703 start-up entrants in the US, distinguishing between trademark and patent applications. The results show that start-ups are more likely to file for a trademark instead of a patent when entering into more competitive market...

A principal-agent model is formulated to capture the efficiency of cooperatives with a member CEO and cooperatives with an employed outsider as CEO. Results of the model show that the incentive strength regarding the member CEO is stronger compared to that of the outside CEO in order to shift...

During the last decade, globalization and liberalization of financial markets, changing societal expectations and corporate governance scandals have increased the attention for the fiduciary duties of non-executive directors. In this context, recent corporate governance reform initiatives have...

Nowadays, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry has been under thorough scrutiny. Popular press claims of intensive marketing activities that go beyond R&D, the strong increase of me-too drugs, and, at the same time, the high industry profitability have contributed to public skepticism. Despite this...

This study explores how organizational antecedents affect potential and realized absorptive capacity. Our study identifies differential effects for both components of absorptive capacity. Results indicate that organizational mechanisms associated with coordination capabilities (i.e....

Means-end relations are generally assumed to be hierarchical, and, by implication, asymmetrical. That is, if A is a means to achieve B, B is not at the same time also a means to achieve A. Literature casting doubt on this directedness of means-end relations is reviewed, and the hypothesis of...

Despite their strategic importance firm’s motivations to extend brands have received only modest attentions by marketing scholars. We use multiple events duration models to examine the timing of launching brand extensions. We provide a theoretical framework of brand extensions based on the...