A financial system can only perform its function of channelling funds from savers toinvestors if it offers sufficient assurance to the providers of the funds that they will reapthe rewards which have been promised to them. To the extent that this assurance is notprovided by contracts alone,...

Financial constraints are frictions that prevent firms from funding all desired investments, which might affect firm value and aggregate economic activity. We investigate whether and how bank governance, especially private vs. non-private bank ownership, affects financial constraints of small...

Does entrepreneurial optimism affect business performance? Using a unique data setbased on repeated survey design, we investigate this relationship empirically. Ourmeasures of ‘optimism’ and ‘realism’ are derived from comparing the turnovergrowth expectations of 133 owners-managers with...

The paper examines the issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR)from the perspective of constitutional economics, focusing on the distinction betweena political community’s constitutional choice of the rules of the ‘‘marketgame,’’ and the market players’ sub-constitutional...

This paper is an empirical test of the hypothesis that the appropriateness of differentbusiness strategies is conditional on the firm’s distance to the industry frontier. We usedata on four 2-digit high-tech manufacturing industries in the US over the period 1972-1999, and apply...

This paper examines the determinants of short-term wage dynamics, using asample of large Hungarian companies for the period of 1996-1999. We test thebasic implications of an efficient contract model of bargaining between theincumbent employees and the managers, which we are unable to reject....

This article describes the benefits and pitfalls of starting a firm with an entrepreneurial team, drawing on a longitudinal empirical analysis of the life course of 90 team start-ups and 1196 solo start-ups in the Netherlands. In the first three years of their existence, team start-ups perform...

Die vorliegende Arbeit möchte am Beispiel der deutschen Abwasserwirtschaft zeigen, daß Privatisierungen möglich und auch notwendig sind, zahlreiche Faktoren jedoch dazu beitragen, daß es eben nicht zu diesen Privatisierungen kommt.