Most skills acquired through on-the-job training may be specific to an occupation and therefore transferable to some but not all firms. However, economists have typically focused on skills that are either specific to a given firm or skills that are completely general. This paper explores the relationship between the size of the local market for an occupation-specific skill and job-training outc...

Predicting markets (such as the stock market) has been and still is a topic of great interest and importance to many people. Unfortunately due to the extremely large number of factors which can affect the market, it is often difficult to accurately assess the value of a new object that is just being released into the world. In this project I will be considering a much smaller scale market in or...

Ginseng is being distributed in 35 countries around the world and there are differences by each country in the distribution volume and amount. However, since there is no accurate statistics on production and distribution amount by each country, it is very difficult to predict the world ginseng market. Ginseng trading companies and governments are in desperate need of comprehensive data that sho...

A thin market is a market with few buying or selling offers. The concept of market thinness, while general, is typically used in the context of financial markets. When the number of buying or selling offers is small, investors' trading positions are large relative to market size. Trading then requires price concessions and thus exerts an impact on prices. A thin market is characterized by low t...

This paper studies the inventive performance and profitability of small and medium sized firms (SMEs) that are “technology specialists” compared to the inventive performance and profitability of SMEs that are instead vertically-integrated. In this paper perspective, “technology specialists” are firms that specialize upstream in generating inventions and trade those inventions in disembodied for...

The transition from conventional power sources to renewable energy sources is taking place in a number of European countries. Electric energy storage has been proposed as an environmentally friendly solution to make this transition possible. This thesis analyzes the profitability of investing in a battery bank in Germany and the UK, using a real options model. The model determines the option va...

The paper investigates issues of scale equivalence and generalisability across different populations. This area of research is important because it allows for valid comparisons to be made when studies investigate the same constructs across qualitatively distinct populations. The study investigates the generalisability of the Narver and Slater (1990) and the Kholi, Jaworski and Kumar (1993) mode...