This paper suggests a holistic framework for analysis of agrarian contracts and investigates the contractual structure in transitional Bulgarian agriculture. Firstly, it incorporates the interdisciplinary New Institutional and Transaction Costs Economics (combining Economics, Organization, Law,...

The paper presents a game-theoretic model in order to investigate to what extent an employee privatization program of a State owned firm can be feasible under certain assumptions concerning the players' objective functions and the market structure in which the firm operates. The public managers...

An argument often adopted to explain the relatively scarce presence of Producer Co-operatives (PCs) in Western capitalist economies is the instability that may affect this type of firm during the positive phases of the business cycle. In a nutshell the argument is that in profitable industries...

From an idealtypical perspective, an enterprise is social if it offers, with a binding commitment to governance, merit goods and services of the commons, using in a non-privatistic manner the most part of profits that may be obtained. This definition is discussed in relation to the...

The role of the cooperative credit banks in the European financial system is growing, particularly during the current period of financial crisis. Nevertheless, these cooperative banks have not received a great deal of attention from scholars. This lack of attention has resulted from two factors:...

Extending Shapiro and Stiglitz’s (1984) analysis of unemployment as a worker discipline device, we evidence how an economy populated by worker owned firms (WOFs), by overcoming information asymmetry on the employee side in the presence of employer opportunism (as embodied in moral hazard,...

Extending Shapiro and Stiglitz’s (1984) analysis of unemployment as a worker discipline device, we evidence how an economy populated by worker owned firms (WOFs), by overcoming information asymmetry on the employee side in the presence of employer opportunism (as embodied in moral hazard,...

The Hicks or direct elasticity of substitution is traditionally derived from the production function. This paper exploits duality theory to present a more general derivation from the input distance function, which is exactly dual to the Shadow Elasticity of Substitution. The new elasticity is...

Most traditional explanations for the decreasing aggregate output volatility - so-called "Great Moderation" - fail to accommodate, or even directly contradict, another aspect of empirical data: the average sales volatility for publicly-traded US firms has been increasing during the same period....

Policies to stimulate export growth and diversify the composition of exports in South Africa are now high on the government’s agenda. In order to understand exporting and its impact on job creation, one needs to understand how firms function, what determines, or constrains, exporting at the...