This paper uses an agency theory perspective to develop an understanding of the determinants of auditor change for small firms in the United Kingdom. The paper, therefore, extends the existing literature (see Williams [22] and Francis and Wilson [9]) from a consideration of auditor change for...

This paper models the borrowing decision of a small firm seeking a bank loan when it can optionally hire, at a cost, an independent external auditor to convey its risk characteristics to lenders. The analysis shows that a necessary condition for a potential borrower to prefer having an audit to...

The motivation for this contingency-type study is based on the notion that prior studies on management accounting systems (MAS) has almost entirely focused on large business organizations and neglected consideration of the effects of contextual variables and MAS on organizational effectiveness...

Small businesses do not share the same financial management problems with large businesses. This paper shows that the source of the differences could be traced to several characteristics unique to small businesses. This uniqueness in turn creates a whole new set of financial management issues....

Small firms that do not have access to organized financial markets must often rely on secured commercial loans for their debt financing. In large firms, debt-related agency problems are often resolved through the bond pricing process in the formal debt markets. When these same debt-related...

The inverse association of capitalization and performance is found to hold over a broader range of firms than has been previously studied. This result is found by merging data for listed United States firms with data for listed Australian companies, which are on average much smaller than their...

This study reports results of a nationwide survey on overall working capital policy of small manufacturing firms. The survey instrument used was a modified version of the 1980 Smith and Sell study [18] on large firms. A detailed 36-question form queried firms on their overall working capital...

Since 1984 Informal Venture Networks (VCNs) have been formed and are currently operating in several states and Canada. However, little has been written in regard to the performance of these networks. This article presents the results of preliminary research concerning their performance. Our...

There is an increased interest in small companies and entrepreneurship among academicians and policy makers. The melting of the cold war and the collapse of the socialist economies of the Soviet bloc, in combination with the interest of the affected countries in imitating some form of...

The incentive stock options (ISOs) are similar to the regular stock call options. However, when one considers various taxing laws regarding the ISO stocks, the ISOs have unique features differentiated from the regular stock call options. In general, no income from ISOs is realized, for tax...