Because of a reduction in the supply of subsidized agricultural credit in Brazil, the economic agents in the agro-industrial systems organized themselves to tie in credit and their buying and selling transactions with farmers. Different types of agreements appeared, characterized by different...

This paper discusses the theoretical and empirical body of research on entrepreneurship, and uses the long-lasting television series The Simpsons to illustrate the main points, approaches, and problems in the literature

The survivor principle holds that the competitive process weeds out inefficient firms, so that hypotheses about efficient behavior can be tested by observing how firms actually behave. This principle underlies a large body of empirical work in strategy, economics, and management. But do...

Policymakers talk about entrepreneurship as a way of improving economic conditions in developing countries the way they used to talk about roads, dams, bridges, and other infrastructure projects. But what exactly is entrepreneurship? Is it simply self-employment or new-venture formation — a...

Unlike most other mature industries; the agricultural production sector is dominated by family firms, partnerships, and cooperatives; with few corporations and limited access to capital derived from a source other than retained earnings and existing owners. However, use of external equity...

Private equity is best understood not as a financing method but as a governance structure, one that emphasizes strong performance incentives, rules over discretion, and a strong alignment between ownership and management. Briefly, private equity governance makes owners into active managers and...

We describe and discuss Ronald Coase's approach to managerial authority, placing it in the broader context of recent economics and management research on intrafirm coordination. To do so, we make use of work by Coase that is relatively little known, namely his writings on opportunity cost...

Debate in management research on the status of the opportunity construct is now more than a decade old. We argue that the debate has led to little additional insight in entrepreneurship and we develop the case for abandoning the construct altogether. Uncertainty is central to entrepreneurship...