This paper documents the frequency and magnitude of “pro forma” earnings in press releases issued during June through August 2000 and describes the 433 firms that engaged in this financial disclosure strategy. We then use a market multiples approach to determine if investors assign a higher (or lower) share price to pro forma firms than other firms. We find no evidence that pro forma firms are ...

We examine the patenting behavior of firms in an industry characterized by rapid technological change and cumulative innovation. Recent survey evidence suggests that semiconductor firms do not rely heavily on patents to appropriate returns to R&D. Yet the propensity of semiconductor firms to patent has risen dramatically since the mid1980s. We explore this apparent paradox by conducting intervi...

This paper explores the relationship between firms’ strategies to share knowledge with their innovation system and innovative performance. The empirical analysis showed that many firms designed strategies to share technological knowledge with competitors, and those firms that shared knowledge with their innovation system earned higher innovative performance than firms that did not share knowled...

Investment in transport infrastructure reduces the cost of distance and enables firms to establish contacts over larger distances. Using data from a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms and geographic information system techniques, this article studies the impact of domestic transport cost reductions on firms’ export market participation, taking into account the role of entry costs and other fi...

Using the quarterly Compustat files, we present empirical findings that business capital investment is significantly higher in the fourth quarter than in other quarters. Even after controlling for business capital investment determinants, we find that the fourth quarter capital investment is significantly larger but less sensitive to investment opportunities than other quarters’ capital investm...

Three dimensions of the performance of firms in Ghana’s manufacturing sector are investigated in this paper: their technology and the importance of technical and allocative efficiency. We show that the diversity of factor choices is not due to a non-homothetic technology. Observable skills are not quantitatively important as determinants of productivity. Technical inefficiency is not lower in f...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a method for evaluating the relative efficiency of a set of firms in a production process. Estimation of cost efficiency is one of the branches of performance evaluation. Cost efficiency evaluates the ability of producing current output with minimum available cost. Now let's assume that there are several groups of firms that operate separately and have differe...

A controversy exists on the use of the investment – cash flow sensitivity as a measure of financing constraints of firms. We re-examine this controversy by analyzing firms affiliated to Indian business groups. We find a strong investment – cash flow sensitivity for both group-affiliated and independent firms, but no significant difference in the sensitivity between them. Additional tests consis...

Micro-enterprises make up the majority of firms in most countries. In New Brunswick, micro-enterprises represent around 73% of all firms (Bourgeois and Dulipovici, 2003). Canada has about one-half million micro-enterprises, representing around 77% of all Canadian firms (Industry Canada, 2001). The proportion of micro-enterprises within the population of firms is even larger when owner-operated ...

This paper focuses on non-internationalized supplier firms and investigates how the expansion of overseas activities by their main customer firms affects their employment, utilizing a unique dataset that includes information on buyer-supplier transaction relationships for Japanese manufacturing firms for the period 1998-2007. We do not find any negative effect of top buyers' overseas expansion ...