The authors consider the theory and evidence on the propensity of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to patent their innovations. Drawing on UK, European and US literature and data sources, they show that small firms are less likely to use patents as a means of protecting their investment...

The notion of 'ownership of the firm' is central to conventional treatments of corporate governance, yet there is very little discussion about what this means in practice. In this paper we briefly draw attention to some of the debates around the notion of ownership in various disciplinary...

In this paper we investigate the motives of high-tech acquieres by analysing their revealed preferences in terms of the high-tech companies they acquire.

In this paper we investigate the incidence of high technology acquisitions using a large international sample of acquisitions by public high technology firms. Controlling for firms’ financial characteristics, we examine the impact of the following innovation-related factors on the propensity...

Using the cases of Wal-Mart and IKEA, this paper takes a productive systems approach to examine Ôvarieties of capitalismÕ from the perspective of the ways by which production and market relations are structured and prioritised. It considers the nature of these relations and their interaction...

This paper critically examines the Greenspan-Summers-IMF thesis concerning the Asian crisis, which suggested that the fundamental causes of the Asian crisis lay in the microeconomic behavior of economic agents in these societies - in the Asian way of doing business. The paper concentrates on...

This paper explores the impact of management characteristics and patterns of collaboration on a firmÕs innovation performance in transforming innovation resources into commercially successful outputs. These questions are investigated using a recent firm level survey database for 465 innovative...

This paper offers a qualitative, case-study based analysis of hostile takeover bids mounted in the UK in the mid-1990s under the regime of the City Code on Takeovers and Mergers. It is shown that during bids, directors of bid targets focus on the concerns of target shareholders to the exclusion...

This paper contrasts 'economic' and 'organizational' approaches to corporate governance, in order to draw out some of their distinctive features and discuss their relative strengths and weaknesses. Some promising areas of new research are identified which examine the role of social controls and...

In the New Property Rights approach the degree of incompleteness of markets is taken independently of the cost of the public ordering and of their efficiency relatively to private orderings. In this approach "public markets", similarly to a Swiss cheese, are either assumed to be non-existent...