A number of authors acknowledge the academic and corporate significance of being able to measure relationships and their quality (Naudé and Buttle 1999; Buttle 1996, 1997; Anton 1994; Copulsky & Wolfe 1990; Grönroos 1991). The authors are currently pursuing such work, and herein present findings from two...

The economic success of Japan in the post-war period and various new forms of market co-ordination in European regions, and specificities of inter-firm relationships in high technology industries have increased academic and business interest in the ways that firms manage relationships between...

The sweeping political changes and institutional transformation in the former Soviet Union, together with the market shock created by the collapse of the Soviet economy were expected to generate substantial changes in firm behaviours. Privatisation, in particular, was thought to constitute the...

A central tenet of economic sociology is that culture and regulatory institutions help to constitute the nature of economic actors and guide their actions, thus affecting economic outcomes (see, e.g., DiMaggio, 1994; Smelser and Swedberg, 1994). As socially organised agents operating in different...

U.K. guidelines on the introduction of new regulations require that politicians and civil servants should “think small first” when deciding whether and how to introduce new regulations that affect business. Similar guidelines are currently being adopted across the EU. This paper presents the...

The principles of business taxation are governed by the Adam Smith’s fourth canon of taxation : ‘every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the treasury of the state’. However,...

The bidder who wins at an auction may end up paying more for an asset than it is actually worth. This, stated very simply, is the so-called winner's curse. Consider the simplest possible case where the asset has the same actual value to all bidders, but bidders do not know for certain what that...

In this paper, we document how European companies can use financial tunnelling to the disadvantageof minority shareholders, despite improved legislation directed at eliminating such activities. In fourcase studies, two German and two Italian, we document how newly established corporate...

Project risk management has become an important area of interest in project management practice over the past decade. Numerous best practice standards, tools and techniques have been developed focussing on a more effective risk management process. This process consists of four main phases:...

A growing literature is using stock return synchronicity, or the R2 from a market model regression,as an inverse measure of the extent to which firm-specific information is reflected in stock prices. Inthis paper, we argue that the relationship between R2 and the informativeness of stock prices...