Innovative firms have an incentive to invest in a flexible technology to employ more sophisticated experimentation strategies. Flexibility in terms of ability to differentiate and to alter quality at no cost is shown to solve the inadequate learning problem in a model with discontinuous demand....

This paper extends the existing estimation methods to allow empirical estimation and hypothesis testing under simultaneous price and output uncertainty.

This paper examines the relationship between firm size, competitive strategy and performance, for the long-lived small firm in Scotland. It uses structural modelling to test the hypothesis that small firms need to remain small if they are to be long-lived. In a three-equation simultaneous model,...

This paper has two goals. First, to provide an accurate characterisation of the new small firm in Scotland by reference to markets, finance, costs, business strategy, human capital, internal organisation and technical change. Second, to use these same features to discover salient differences...

This paper reports on one of the first empirical attempts to investigate small firm growth and survival, and their determinants, in the Peoples’ Republic of China. The work is based on field work evidence gathered from a sample of 83 Chinese private firms (mainly SMEs) collected initially by...

TWe study the impact of both microeconomic factors and the macroeconomy on the financial distress of Chinese listed companies over a period of massive economic transition, 1995 to 2006. Based on an economic model of financial distress under the institutional setting of state protection against...

While a competitive firm facing price uncertainty has been extensively studied, this is not so for output uncertainty. This paper analyzes the behavior of a competitive firm facing multiplicative output uncertainty, either with or without price uncertainty. We depict equilibrium and obtain...

Principal-agent analysis is applied to contemporary evidence on venture capital investment. The investor (as principal) and investee (as agent) are analysed in terms of risk management, information handling and the trading of risk and information. Investors and investees were paired in 'dyads',...

When modeling output uncertainty, the multiplicative specification is consistently chosen over the additive form, despite the latter being arguably intuitively more obvious. The rationale for this seems to be that when production risk is the only source of uncertainty, additive uncertainty does...