This paper shows how separation of ownership and control may arise as a response to overload costs, despite agency costs, and how conglomerates arise as solution to information asymmetries in capital markets. In a context where entrepreneurs have the ability to run projects and improve their...

Both educational attainment and school quality are typically lower in disadvantaged areas than others and much recent policy attention has been focused on each. This paper looks at the quality problem, exploring the relationships between disadvantaged contexts, what schools do, and the quality...

We investigate the strategies, HR attributes and their synergies that are associated with superior performance in service SMEs using data from the UK Tourism Hospitality and Leisure (THL) sector. A major advantage of our analysis is that our sample includes information also on very small firms...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...

Using nationally representative panel data for British private sector workplaces this paper points to the importance of distinguishing between workplace and firm size when analysing employment growth, and finds that the factors associated with growth differ markedly between single independent...

This paper centres around the question of ownership of firms and managerial competition and how these affect managers and employees’ incentives to invest in human capital. We argue that employees’ incentives in human capital investment are affected by both ownership and competition since...