This paper investigates the importance of managerial capital to involuntary insolvency and acquisition in UK small and medium-sized companies. Given that small businesses are informationally opaque and lack detailed financial data, the role of non-financial factors such as managerial capital has...

It is commonly asserted that high rates of entrepreneurship and superior economic performance in the United States is linked to a higher cultural tolerance of business failure. After reviewing cross country patterns of entrepreneurship we develop in this paper a measure of cultural attitudes...

Why do small firms in emerging industries choose to diversify? Theories of strategic management suggest that diversification is driven by search for exogenous market opportunities, deployment of slack resources, or the exploitation of current knowledge. Institutional organization theory suggests...

The extraordinary growth of the Irish economy - the 'Celtic Tiger' - since the mid-1990s has attracted a great deal of interest, commentary and research. Indeed, many countries are now looking to Ireland as an economic development role model, and The Sapir Report (2003) has suggested that...

In this paper we have attempted to examine aspects of the competitive selection process, firms’ entry, survival and exit, in an important sector of Chinese manufacturing, looking in particular for changes resulting from the latest stage of reform, dubbed the transition to the “socialist...

This paper provides an overview of the role of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in employment generation in both advanced and developing countries and a critique of the 'job generation' literature in both contexts. It sets out an analytical approach to the question of SME growth based...

Theories suggesting either static or dynamic productivity gains derived from exports often assume the prior existence of a perfect market. In the presence of market failure, however, the competition effect and the resource reallocation effect of exports on productive efficiency may be greatly...

Facing exogenous changes and endogenous impasses, Emilia-Romagna, one of the richest regions in Europe, is undergoing transformation. In this paper, we outline the dynamics of change at the regional level, both in the changes in the interrelationships among the major actors, and the emergence of...

The paper introduces the three articles in this Policy Feature, concerned respectively with competition, corporate governance and selection in emerging markets. Apart from being important in their own right, it is shown how these topics have recently acquired urgent domestic and international...

A striking feature of theorising about corporate governance, whether from the perspective of economics or in terms of a stakeholder model of the company, is that even quite basic questions posed at the outset remain to be answered. Thus, in the case of economic theorising about the firm, it has...