Using a panel data set of 361 German corporations for the period 1991-1996 we test the hypothesis that firms with more efficient governance structures have higher profitabilities. To determine efficiency we compare firms with respect to ownership concentration, the identity of owners, capital...

With German reunification in 1990, the EastGerman economy has been challenged to be transformedfrom a centrally planned economy to acompetitive market economy with the samestandard of living as in West Germany. Thegeneral intention has been to close the hugeeconomic gap between East German and...

Strong lending relationships between banks and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a key role in the bank-based financial system of Germany. So far, they have been mainly described by the notion of a housebank and transactional features of long-term bank-customer relationships. In...

Although there has been an intensive debate on the relative merits of different sys-tems of corporate governance, empirical evidence on the link between corporate governance andfirm performance almost exclusively refers to the market-oriented Anglo-Saxon system. This papertherefore investigates...

Utilizing a unique data set, Zoltan Acs and David Audretsch provide a rich empirical analysis of the increased importance of small firms in generating technological innovations and their growing contribution to the U.S. economy. They identify the contributions made by both small and large firms...

It once took two decades to replace one-third of the Fortune 500; now a subset of new firms are challenging and displacing this elite group at a breathtaking rate, while armies of startups come and go within just a few years. Most new jobs are, in fact, coming from small firms, reversing the trend...