While numerous empirical studies include proxies for growth opportunities in their analyses, there is limited evidence as to the validity of the various growth proxies used. Based on a sample of 1942 firm-years for listed UK companies over the 1990-2004 period, we assess the performance of eight...

Despite a documented decline in the number of dividend payers in the UK it is found that aggregate real dividends paid by industrials actually increased between 1979 and 2000. This was attributed to the firms lost from the sample being generally small distributors of dividends whilst the growth...

This paper investigates the dividend decisions of firms in the UK reporting losses after sustained periods of profitability. It is found that loss-making firms are more likely to reduce dividends compared to firms that remain profitable, although a loss is far from a guarantee that the dividend...

In 1990, Britain became the first developed country to reorganise its electricity industry to run on competitive lines. The British reforms are widely regarded as the benchmark for other reforms and the model used provides the basis for reforms of electricity and other network industries around...

Creative destruction is an economic theory of innovation popularised by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (2006). In this paper, Schumpeter’s theories are used to explain how radical technological innovations in information-intensive industries are influencing the erosion of traditional...

Creative destruction is an economic theory of innovation popularised by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (2006). In this paper, Schumpeter’s theories are used to explain how radical technological innovations in information-intensive industries are influencing the erosion of traditional...

Marketing in today’s highly competitive environment needs to consider forces that go beyond most firms’ available resources and capabilities. Work by Adomavicius et al. (among others) regarding the differentiation between product – infrastructure – ecosystem has gained increasing...

Increasingly ICT-based virtual products are challenging physical products and markets. Obsolescence has become a real effect for an augmented number of established industries due to the facilitation of access, consumption, and permanent, immediate availability, which dematerialised products...

We use the British real estate and investment fund industries as experimental settings where historic cost (HC) and fair value accounting (FVA) can be compared. Both industries have the majority of their assets marked to market and hence the difference between the two accounting systems is...

Prior research on capital structure by Rajan and Zingales (1995) suggests that the level of gearing in UK companies is positively related to size and tangibility, and negatively correlated with profitability and the level of growth opportunities. However, as argued by Harris and Raviv (1991),...