This paper analyses the effect of risk attitudes of firm owners on profits among micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in Lagos, Nigeria. Higher risk perceptions are shown to have a significant positive effect on profits, whereas risk propensity has a negative or no effect. Education, age, being...

The main contribution of entrepreneurship theory to economics is to provide an account of market performance in disequilibrium but little empirical research has examined firm entry and exit in this context. We redress this by modelling the interrelationship between firm entry and exit in...

Do shareholders of acquiring companies profit from acquisitions, or do acquiring CEOs overbidand destroy shareholder value? Answering this question is difficult since the hypotheticalcounterfactual is hard to determine. We exploit merger contests to address the identificationissue. In those...

Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of good management for firm performance. Here, we focus on management in not-for-profits (NFPs). We present a model predicting that management quality will be lower in NFPs compared to for-profits (FPs), but that outputs may not be worse if...

This paper compares the post-investment value-added activities performed by governmental venture capital (GVC) and independent venture capital (IVC) for their portfolio companies, and controls for the selection effect that the different investment profiles of these investors might have on the...

Using a new database on the currency composition of assets and liabilities, this paper explores the determinants and consequences of currency mismatches in Chilean non-financial firms. As in previous firm level studies for Chile, we find that in periods following a depreciation firms with higher...

Dada la multiplicidad de factores que pueden afectar el desempeño empresarial, tanto para los empresarios mismos como para las autoridades económicas de los países es preciso establecer la severidad de estos obstáculos para enfocar sus esfuerzos en los problemas más críticos. En este...

Over the last 20 years, Mexico redefined the role of the state in its economy through an ambitious program to liberalize trade, promote efficiency and reduce the size and scope of the state-owned sector. In Mexico, privatization led to a significant improvement in firm performance, as...

This paper builds a new dataset on bank ownership and bank performance covering approximately 50,000 observations for 119 countries over the 1995-2002 period. The paper then uses the dataset to reassess the relationship between bank ownership and bank performance, providing separated estimations...

This paper is an empirical test of the hypothesis that the appropriateness of different business strategies is conditional on the firm's distance to the industry frontier. We use data on four 2-digit high-tech manufacturing industries in the US over the period 1972-1999, and apply...