The present paper analyzes the top ten Italian state-owned enterprises (SOEs) over the period 2004-2013, after both their corporate organization and their markets have been deeply reformed. We question whether SOEs' strategies are more profit or public oriented. The authors find that, on...

Commercial firms are increasingly tying the sales of their products with donations to a charitable cause. Apart from a charitable motive, offering these charity-linked bundles could be a strategic instrument for firms to increase profits. We report the results of an experiment that investigates...

In the nineties, average firm size decreased, organisations decentralized, and workers preferences shifted from large to small firms. Our model identifies the economic forces behind this trend. Small firms with little capital at risk are subject to risk-shifting. They realize more of their...

Strong lending relationships between banks and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a key role in the bank-based financial system of Germany. So far, they have been mainly described by the notion of an housebank and transactional features of long-term bank-customer relationships. The...

This review discusses frontier topics in economic geography as they relate to firms and agglomeration economies. We focus on areas where empirical research is scarce but possible. We first outline a conceptual framework for city formation that allows us to contemplate what empiricists might...

Based on a novel dataset, the "German Management and Organizational Practices" (GMOP) Survey, we calculate establishment specific management scores following Bloom and van Reenen as indicators of management quality. We find substantial heterogeneity in management practices across establishments...

Diversified firms often trade at a discount with respect to their focused counterparts. The literature has tried to explain the apparent misallocation of resources with lobbying activities or power struggles. We show that diversification can destroy value even when resources are efficiently...

From the 1990s, it intensified in the global economy the implementation of strategies for companies of fragmenting their production processes and allocate their productive activities in various countries and regions, forming with this global value chains to recreate the international division of...

This academic work address about the Chilean state owned company (CODELCO) and how it deals with the recommendations of OECD in order to define determined corporate governance. The core of this work is based on establishing a critic analysis to these guidelines. In the last decades, state owned...

Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain company and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles? We collect data on core management practices from over 11,000 firms in 34 countries. We find large cross-country differences in the...