The paper analyses the small- and medium-sized enterprise sector in Poland, seeking to answer the question of whether SME development along current lines is sufficient to assure the sustainable development of the Polish economy.

This paper discusses mixed systems in which SMEs functioned successfully in the presence of extensive state ownership of large enterprises and even classical central planning. Past and present examples are considered in which a small enterprise system worked around , with, and in the interstices...

Price markups over marginal cost are often higher on "aftermarket" parts, service, and supplies for durable goods that they are on the goods themselves. One explanation for this phonomenons is that the aftermarket good is used as a "metering" device to price discriminate among consumer, a model...

Motivated by relatively recent theoretical contributions on the role played by uncertainty, sunk costs and technological change in influencing entry, exit and industry structure, we conduct an empirical analysis covering 267 U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 1963-1992.

We propose a simple model of a partially integrated industry which explicitely takes into account persistant production cost differences across upstream firms, such as one might observe in natural resource industries. The model allows us to highlight the respective roles of strategic...

The 1998 reform of the Italy's retail trade sector delegated the regulation of entry of large stores to the regional governments. We use the local variation in regulation to determine the effects of entry barriers on firms' performance for a representative sample of retailers. We address the...

A key feature of Soviet-type economies is the excessive concentration of production and the skewed size distribution of enterprises. This is the root cause of the `soft budget constraint' and a natural outcome of the political economy of these countries. Given entrenched political support for a...

How do banks react to increased competition? Recent banking theory offers conflicting predictions about the impact of competition on bank orientation - i.e., the choice of relationship based versus transactional banking - and bank industry specialization. We empirically investigate the impact of...

This paper develops an industry equilibrium model of vertical integration under contractual imperfections with specific input suppliers and external investors. I assume that vertical integration economizes on the needs for contracts with specific input suppliers at the cost of higher financial...

Using data from a unique pricing experiment, we investigate Vickrey’s conjecture that responsive pricing can be used to smooth both predictable and unpredictable demand shocks. Our evidence shows that increasing the responsiveness of price to demand conditions reduces the magnitude of...