Two recent papers examine the impact of corporate bankruptcy laws on new business start-ups in 29 countries over 1990 - 2008 (Peng et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2010). In this commentary, I briefly point out two significant issues which future researchers might want to consider. First, several countries...

As of 1998, nine percent of the shares of all firms in the US, primarily young and small ones, have been owned, essentially by about 17 million employees. The recent trend of new ventures to grant company-wide stock options plans is an alignment of the interests of management, shareholders, and...

In recent years, the use of stock options as an incentive compensation scheme has evolved to be one of the most debated topics in the finance literature as well as in the corporate world. The investigations into the option granting practices at a number of U.S. firms, which were accused of...

This paper examines issues involving employee stock option plans as a part of employee compensation. In particular, employee stock options requiring a requisite service period are viewed as an option on options and hence, a compound option, as the employee’s future market wage rate is unknown....

The purpose of this paper is to provide a direct test of the small-firm uniqueness hypothesis advanced by Ang (1991). We do this by using the 5B-IPO program of the SEC as our instrument to define a small firm. Having identified small firms, we test the three IPO anomalies to see if small firms...

We empirically examine a sample of over 350 entrepreneurial firms that successfully receive an SBA guaranteed loan. The first portion of the paper contains descriptive statistics that lend anecdotal evidence concerning the organization type of borrowers, the incidence of collateral, the reasons...

The close link between the personal financial affairs of a small business owner and his or her firm has been noted in prior research. This article compares attitudes toward risk on the part of small business owners (SBOs) and non-small business owners (NSBOs). In addition, it compares the...

The importance of an accurate sales forecast to financial management in general is well documented. Although large firms' forecasting practices as they relate to financial management have been surveyed, this is the first such study on small (manufacturing) firms. Surprisingly, the two groups are...

This paper contains a review of issues pertaining to the valuation of privately held businesses, noting significant inconsistencies in the rationale and approaches taken in the valuation process. In addition to suggesting that appraisers stay with the "tried and true" rather than testing the...

This paper attempts to extend the Certification Paradigm--mainly used in the literature as an explanation for IPO underpricings--to provide guidelines to entrepreneurs in their efforts to secure funding for new ventures. After extending the model to cases of pre-venture-capital start-up firms,...