Many potential benefits of foreign expansion have been identified in the literature, yet empirical support that multinational firms perform better than domestic firms is mixed. This paper takes a longitudinal perspective and argues that how much a firm benefits from having foreign subsidiaries...

This paper explores the nature of the relationship between Head Office and stores in a large British supermarket chain. It focuses on the role played by a range of technological tools available for managing the stock and connecting different parts of the productive system and the implications...

For nearly three centuries the spectacular rise and fall of the South Sea Company has gripped the public imagination as the most graphic warning to investors of the dangers of unbridled speculation. Yet history repeats itself and the same elemental forces that drove up the price of South Sea...

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the evolving relationship between the British trading company John Swire and Sons and its Chinese partners involved in the distribution of its products, notably sugar. From the nineteenth century, Swire had utilised the Chinese system of the Comprador....

This paper outlines the development of international firms over the period from 1870 to 1945. It shows how British and other European trading firms developed international investment operations using the medium of free-standing companies. This was the origin of Royal Dutch Shell amongst other...

This paper is motivated by the difficulties faced by forecasters in predicting the decline in the growth rate of consumers': expenditure in the late 1980s. The econometric specifications of four competing explanations are replicated and the static forecasts compared with the actual outturns. The...

This article reviews recently proposed likelihood ratio tests of goodness-of-fit and independence of interval forecasts. It recasts them in the framework of Pearson chi-squared statistics, and considers their extension to density forecasts. The use of the familiar framework of contingency tables...

This paper examines the extent to which the remuneration levels of non-owner managers employed by UK small and medium size enterprises (SME) can be explained empirically by a number of firm specific, human capital and job history characteristics. The UK SME sector is very heterogeneous and we...

This paper contributes to the developing literature on complementarities in organizational design. We test for the existence of complementarities in the use of external networking between stages of the innovation process in a sample of UK and German manufacturing plants. Our evidence suggests...

Globally the biopharmaceutical industry is characterized by strong competition, research-intensive and protracted new product development (NPD) processes, intensive regulation and extensive alliance activity. Policy regimes and operating environments differ markedly, however. Here we examine how...