Internet firms charge a wide range of prices for homogeneous products, and high-priced firms remain high-priced and low-priced firms remain low-priced over long periods. One explanation is that high-price firms are charging a premium for superior service. An alternative, price-dispersion explanation is that firms vary the prices for informed and uniformed consumers (Salop and Stiglitz, 1977) or...

We examine how the ownership, analyst coverage and stock market valuation of a sample of U.S. firms vary with their environmental performance. Both “green” and “toxic” firms have a larger number of shareholders but a smaller percentage of institutional owners and ownership stakes relative to environmentally neutral firms. Nonetheless, toxic firms have higher institutional ownership than green f...

Green investing, or socially responsible investing (SRI), which refers to making investment decisions according to both financial and ethical criteria, has become increasingly popular in recent years. This paper explores the effects of ethical screening on the investment decisions of firms that fail the screen (’polluting’ firms) and on their decisions to reform so as to pass the screen. The pa...

Sri Lanka’s Termination of Employment of Workmen Act (TEWA) requires that firms with 15 or more workers justify layoffs and provide generous severance pay to displaced workers, with smaller firms being exempted. Although formally subject to TEWA, firms in Export Promotion Zones (EPZs) do not face the same constraints as nonEPZ firms due to size incentives and lax labor law enforcement in that s...

The ability of foreign firms to bring in additional capital to a host country together with technological and skill spillovers may relieve domestic firms of their financial constraints. Yet, some foreign firms borrow more from the local capital markets than the amount of capital they bring in, worsening the financial constraints of the domestic firms. We use a panel of 182 Ghanaian manufacturin...

The study primarily investigated whether there has been a tangible shift in the activities of the Indian software firms towards higher end of the value chain and factors that helped the firms to make transitions. The objectives were examined by broad examination of thirty nine software firms and deeper investigation based on case study of three firms derived from the above selected firms. It wa...

従来のユーザ・イノベーションは，ユーザの情報発信力は限定され，個別のユーザの情報は企業が集約して拾い集めることを前提として，ユーザを巻き込みながらも，製品や製品に関する情報は企業が統制し，市場に提供するという形態であった．

The export sector is considered an important sector for developing countries; hence it is important to understand the behavior of exporting firms. This paper looks at the financial structure of such firms and investigates plausible relationships between export status and leverage. If product demand from abroad has a low correlation with domestic demand, we would expect export-intensive firms to...