Objectives: We examine decision factors of family firm owners for hiring a non-family Chief Financial Officer (CFO). We explore the perceptions of family firm owners towards external managers by analyzing how their family-specific and company-specific goals relate to the employment of a...

We study the investment of criminal organizations in the legal economy. We focus on Italy, a country historically plagued by a conspicuous presence of mafia-type organizations. By using the exogenous credit contraction imposed by the 2007 financial crisis we highlight how the consequences for...

This paper explains the emergence of liquidity traps in the aftermath of large-scale financial crises, as happened in the US 1930s, Japan 1990s and recently in the US and Europe. The paper introduces a new balance sheet channel that links equity capital to the risk-free interest rate. When...

This paper explores whether refinancing risk is an important determinant of maturity decisions by investigating how firms with refinancing risk choose the maturity of new loans they obtain during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. The firms' refinancing risk is measured by the maturing portion of...

The European Union Emissions Trading System has raised concerns about possible detrimental effects on firms production through an increase in polluting costs, unless firms change inputs or increase the efficiency in the way they produce. We provide evidence of the causal impact of this policy on...

What locations generate more business ideas, and where are ideas more likely to turn into businesses? Using comprehensive administrative data on business applications, we analyze the spatial disparity in the creation of business ideas and the formation of new employer startups from these ideas....

This research note examines the relationship between start-up rates and GDP per capita growth in urban and rural regions in Germany. Hereby, we take into account that urban and rural areas differ markedly in their resource endowment for entrepreneurship, which might be responsible for different...

Goal structures in family firms seems of particular interest to the field as the overall orientation and the objectives of family firms are determined in an area of potential conflict between the two subsystems of firm and family. We asked shareholders of German family firms to rate the...

In Africa’s least developed countries (LDCs), escape from poverty and convergence to livingstandards of more advanced economies depends critically on structural transformation and theemergence of productive entrepreneurship that would accelerate growth and job creation. So far,however,...