Technological Innovation, Financial Fragility and Complex Dynamics In this paper we suggest a scaling approach to business cycles. We develop a heterogeneous interacting agents (HIAs) model that replicates well known industrial dynamics stylized facts, as the power law distribution of firms’ size and the Laplace distribution of firms’ growth rates. In particular, the power law is a persistent b...

Organizations face increased pressures to continually advance knowledge and new technologies for their long-term success and prosperity. University research centers offer important interorganizational linkages for industry–university collaboration, conducive for advancing knowledge and new technologies. This study examined industry’s strategic objectives for establishing relationships with univ...

The article examines the European Commission’s use of its legal powers over mergers. It discusses and tests two views. One is that the ‘neo-liberal’ Commission has ended previous industrial policies of aiding ‘national champion’ firms to grow through mergers and instead pursues a ‘merger constraining’ policy of vigorously using its legal powers to block mergers. The other is that the Commission...

This paper argues that the existence of knowledge-intensive firms pose puzzelments for the contractual theories of the firm. For example, in knowledge-intensive firms physical assets are widely absent, the nature of employment relations and assetownership are much less clear compared to industrial firms. Although knowledge-intensive firms account for a growing share in wealth-creation and emplo...

The debt maturity of U.S. industrial firms decreased over the past three decades. This decrease in maturity is driven by the smallest firms for which the median percentage of long-term debt has decreased from 53% in 1976 to 6% in 2008. For large firms, however, debt maturity has not declined. Information asymmetry plays an important role in explaining the decrease in debt maturity, while debt a...

This paper explores the determinants of export performance at the level of firms in respect of their characteristics and supply side constraints. The analysis is based on a survey of export-oriented firms in four major sectors. The results indicate a relationship between the better performance of foreign-owned firms to their better know-how and resources compared to the domestically owned firms...

This paper considers the current performance and future prospects of newly-established private manufacturing firms in Russia, using information gathered in a mid-1994 World Bank survey of 439 Russian industrial firms, including forty-odd de novo private firms. The paper finds that in terms of most performance indicators, de novo private manufacturing firms look significantly better than their s...

The net foreign asset positions (NFAP) of developing countries and emerging markets tend to be short equity and either short or long debt, while most industrial nations are long equity and short debt. This paper proposes that financial system inefficiencies associated with underdeveloped financial markets can explain this difference in the NFAPs. Financial system imperfections typically found i...

Recent literature has witnessed increasing attention to the growth of high technology firms in emerging markets such as China, India and Russia (Bruton & Rubanik, 2002; Li & Atuahene-Gima, 2001; The Economist, 2004). The development of technology firms represents a driving force for economic transformation in these emerging markets. Technology firms not only help develop new wealth, but also cr...