In this paper we investigate the relationship between the number of lawyers and civil litigation across Italian provinces over the period 2000-2005. First, we document the existence of a positive correlation between the number of lawyers and litigation. We then employ a 2SLS approach to verify...

Aim of this paper is to explore the main drivers of outsourcing of knowledge intensive business services by Italian manufacturing firms. While anecdotal and empirical evidence has emphasized labour cost and scale economies as behind firms' choices to outsource production or service activities,...

Business advisors and their impact on the perfor -mance of micro, small and medium-sized com- panies (MSMEs) have been in the focus of many researchers for a long time. MSMEs are reporting increasing interest in professional business advice, but only a small share of MSME owners is using...

This report examines international policy experiences in designing and implementing online business diagnostic tools for SME and entrepreneurship development. These tools offer entrepreneurs and small business managers an individual online assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of their...

This chapter investigates the relationship between service quality of Baitul Maal wat-Tamwil (BMT) and the satisfaction of small and micro-enterprises in Indonesia with perceived benefits as the mediating variable. Primary data is collected from 454 small and micro-enterprises located in the...

Notwithstanding their remarkable recent growth, surprisingly little research has hitherto been conducted on the evolving geography of professional and business services in Britain. This paper analyses the results of a detailed survey of 300 small and medium-sized management and engineering...

Why do small firms in emerging industries choose to diversify? Theories of strategic management suggest that diversification is driven by search for exogenous market opportunities, deployment of slack resources, or the exploitation of current knowledge. Institutional organization theory suggests...