Among the most prominent theoretical frameworks dealing with the economic underlyings of firms' make-or-buy decisions are Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and the Resource Based View (RBV). Relying on panel data covering 107 European firms over eight years, I test predictions from both TCE and...

Does public ownership have negative consequences for professional service firms by reducing employee incentives? I address this question with a panel of advertising agencies. Public ownership was associated with inferior performance for small agencies but not for large agencies; and there was no...

This work discusses the mathematical foundations of a post-positivist research framework to explain surprising facts in the expected behaviour of any complex, dynamic and contingent phenomenon, reconciling the ontological and epistemological assumptions of Critical Realism with the American...

After some two years of deliberations, in July 2006 the SEC released its long-awaited Guidance on the scope of the soft dollar safe harbor. Passed as part of the Securities Acts Amendments in May, 1975, the safe harbor has protected fund advisers and other money managers for over 30 years from...

This paper relies on the economics of transaction costs to assess the likely effect on investor welfare of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC's) prohibition on an innovative business practice known as directed brokerage. Its key insight is that the quality of a broker's execution...

As I write this, markets across the globe are in turmoil and economies are slowing due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout the early phases of the turmoil, we heard explanatory narratives beginning to form such as, “This came out of nowhere! No-one saw this coming.” The irony is that...

Industries serve an important function in strategic entrepreneurship. By placing the industrial structure at the focal point of analysis, Porter's five forces model explains why some industries are more profitable than others. Yet, despite their importance in strategic entrepreneurship, studies...

This paper considers the optimal public ownership policy of an upstream firm which competes with a foreign private rival. Both firms supply a produced input to the domestic and foreign downstream firms that compete in an export market. The paper shows that complete privatization of the domestic...

This study aims to provide a formal haggling theory of firm boundaries. In the face of unforeseen disturbances in trade circumstances, trading parties engage in ex post contract renegotiation, which ends with either agreement, disagreement, or third-party intervention. Given that the third-party...

In this paper, to begin with, we define soft information as qualitative, subjective information produced by banks through the establishment of long-term lending relationships. We then highlight the importance of soft information for cooperative and social banks in the screening, pricing and...