This paper reports on the behaviour of young (less than three years old) micro-firms (less than ten employees) in Scotland, with an emphasis on life-cycle effects. Two main tests were carried out. The first took Gibrat's Law (that growth is independent of size) as the null hypothesis, and a...

This paper seeks a good measure of new business performance, and then explains this measure by various dimensions of business strategy. Three criteria are used to create a one dimensional ordinal ranking of high, medium and low performance for new business starts: employment growth; return on...

The small firm is viewed as taking a complex of actions to facilitate market place survival. Selection of such actions involves choice about markets, costs, strategy, finance, organisation, human capital and innovation. Probit models of survival over two years are estimated for a random sample...

Two components of work activity are considered: observed effort, which can be rewarded directly, and unobserved helping or communication in a team which increases productivity. Positivite spillovers from helping can generate multiple equilibria (as in imperfectly competitive macroeconomies)....

In samples of employees from two firms, women are segregated in low-pay occupations and therefore receive lower returns on their (similar) educational qualifications than men. In the primary-sector, capital intensive, unionised firm, all wages are much higher. In the secondary-sector firm,...

This paper examines the relationship between firm size, competitive strategy and performance, for the long-lived small firm in Scotland. It uses structural modelling to test the hypothesis that small firms need to remain small if they are to be long-lived. In a three-equation simultaneous model,...

We present a new model of employee involvement with incomplete contracts and uncertain monitoring. Distributional considerations limit productivity and generate excessive monitoring under employee control, so co-determination can increase both efficiency and labour's share of the enterprise...

Principal-agent analysis is applied to contemporary evidence on venture capital investment. The investor (as principal) and investee (as agent) are analysed in terms of risk management, information handling and the trading of risk and information. Investors and investees were paired in 'dyads',...

The work of the Oxford Economic Research Group under the chairmanship of George Richardson is taken as the starting point for a new analysis of the limits to small firm growth. Following Richardson's emphasis on costs of organisational change within the growing firm, caused by the need to train...

Three tests of contingency theory are presented. The central hypothesis is that information system development is determined by contingencies. Data relate to the period 1994-98 for a sample of new Scottish micro firms. Contingency theory is tested by correlation, cluster and regression analysis....