We survey the phenomenon of the growth of firms drawing on literature from economics, management and sociology. We begin with a review of empirical "stylised facts" before discussing theoretical contributions. Firm growth is characterized by a predominant stochastic element, making it difficult...

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an extended overview on the debate on the European firm, by articulating it against the backdrop of more traditional theories of the firm. The chapter also proposes a different interpretation of the issue by grafting the discussion into the...

Recent financial crises and scandals have focused attention on the system of governance and disclosure in a way many may never have imagined and few welcomed. Not only do reforms appear to be necessary to protect shareholders as well as other stakeholders, but also to develop a different...

The aim of this paper is to reconsider the link between vertical integration and disintegration which are traditionally opposed in the literature. The conception of integration and disintegration closely depends on the way we define the firm and its role. This paper focuses on human...

Douglass North, along with Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson, transformed the early intuitions of new institutional economics into powerful conceptual and analytical tools that spawned a robust base of empirical research. NIE arose in response to questions not well explained by standard...

In this paper, I focus on the extension of transaction costs to appropriative activity and coercive power in the property rights approach. It has been argued that including the costs of appropriation and violent enforcement in transaction costs is based on the assumption that Coaseian bargaining...

New Institutional Economics, based on the Coasean comparative approach, offers a highly useful framework for research on environmental problems. We propose a tentative analytic framework for environmental problems and we try its heuristic power by first applying it to the Poitou-Charentes...

In this paper we deal with a utility maximization problem at finite horizon on a continuous-time market with conical (and time varying) constraints (particularly suited to model a currency market with proportional transaction costs). In particular, we extend the results in Campi and Owen (2011)...

The central message conveyed in this chapter is that there is a whole class of economic organizations that contribute substantially to what Coase (1992) called "the institutional structure of production". These arrangements fall neither under pure market relationships nor within 'firm...

VNF (2010)'s statistical data show a remarkable resilience of inland navigation in France during the recession. Yet at least part of the profession is in crisis: the boatmen are now likely to be close to bankruptcy. Key players in the fully liberalized (since 2000) spot market, small independent...