Financial Attitudes in Family Firms: The Moderating Role of Family Commitment

This study investigates how family commitment moderates whether and how financial knowledge, positive experience with debt suppliers, and economic goal orientation affect owner–managers' attitudes toward debt financing in family firms. Using a sample of 280 German family firms, we find significant relationships between both financial knowledge and positive experience with debt suppliers and owner–managers' financial attitudes toward debt. Our findings show that family commitment moderates these relationships such that high family commitment increases the impact of prior experience with debt suppliers, though the effect of economic goal orientation is lowered and reversed. Overall, we contribute to research on financial decision making, capital structure, and social capital in family firms.     

Financial Institutions and the Estate Agents Industry in the 1980s

The changes which have taken place in the estate agents industry in the 1980s have transformed it from one dominated by small local firms, to one where the major participants are large national financial institutions. Concentration in the industry has increased substantially over the decade and entry conditions are such that it is unlikely to decrease in the coming years. The main reason why the institutions have entered the industry appears to be to market their other services through estate agents. This situation raises problems in terms of whether agents will act in the best interests of their client.     

On MLEs in an extended multivariate linear growth curve model

In this paper the extended growth curve model is considered. The literature comprises two versions of the model. These models can be connected by one-to-one reparameterizations but since estimators are non-linear it is not obvious how to transmit properties of estimators from one model to another. Since it is only for one of the models where detailed knowledge concerning estimators is available (Kollo and von Rosen, Advanced multivariate statistics with matrices. Springer, Dordrecht, 2005) the object in this paper is therefore to present uniqueness properties and moment relations for the estimators of the second model. One aim of the paper is also to complete the results for the model presented in Kollo and von Rosen (Advanced multivariate statistics with matrices. Springer, Dordrecht, 2005). The presented proofs of uniqueness for linear combinations of estimators are valid for both models and are simplifications of proofs given in Kollo and von Rosen (Advanced multivariate statistics with matrices. Springer, Dordrecht, 2005).     

Weibull, RRSB or extreme-value theorists?

The Weibull distribution was discovered by Rosin, Rammler, Sperling and Bennett between 1932 and 1936 in the context of particle measurement. Weibull found the same distribution a little later while investigating the strength of materials. More than 10 years after, in 1951, he finally showed that this distribution has the potential for wide applications in statistics. However, does this justify that only his name is used to denote this important probability distribution? A neutral technical name like “powered exponential distribution” might be more suitable. This paper discusses the papers by Rosin, Rammler, Sperling and Bennett as well as Weibull’s work.     

How important are dual economy effects for aggregate productivity?

This paper brings together development accounting techniques and the dual economy model to address the role that factor markets have in creating variation in aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). Development accounting research has shown that much of the variation in income across countries can be attributed to differences in TFP. The dual economy model suggests that aggregate productivity is depressed by having too many factors allocated to low productivity work in agriculture. Data show large differences in marginal products of similar factors within many developing countries, offering prima facie evidence of this misallocation. Using a simple two-sector decomposition of the economy, this article estimates the role of these misallocations in accounting for the cross-country income distribution. A key contribution is the ability to bring sector-specific data on human and physical capital stocks to the analysis. Variation across countries in the degree of misallocation is shown to account for 30–40% of the variation in income per capita, and up to 80% of the variation in aggregate TFP.     

Contextual and Interactional Approaches to Advancing Leadership and Entrepreneurship Research

In this introductory article for the special issue of Journal of Management Studies, entitled ‘Leading Entrepreneurial Ventures: Individual and Team-Based Perspectives’, we leverage insights in the extant literature as well as those insights developed by the authors of the four articles published in response to our call for papers. Overall, we explore multiple nuanced questions with regards to research on entrepreneurship, research on leadership, and their intersection. Our goal is to begin to help guide research on entrepreneurship and leadership, and their intersection, for the next decade.     

The counter-effects of market regulation

Regulation can have counter-effects that work against the interests of those who advocate it, in both centrally-planned and market economies. Little research on these effects has been carried out so far, with the result that they have been ignored by policymakers.     

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Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Market Efficiency, Bounded Rationality, and Supplemental Business Reporting Disclosures

The AICPA Special Committee on Financial Reporting has urged disclosure of relevant forward-looking information on risks and opportunities to supplement conventional financial statements. We conduct a laboratory market experiment to assess the effects of such disclosures on capital allocation decisions. We develop two sets of competing hypotheses regarding how capital markets react to supplemental disclosures. One set is based on the assumption of semi-strong market efficiency, while the other posits that the bounded rationality of individual traders leads to inefficient market prices. We find that explicit disclosure of management's best estimate of an uncertain quantity improves market efficiency, even though this disclosure is redundant with information in financial statements. Second, we find disclosure of an upper bound of management's estimate has the potential to bias security prices upward, while informationally equivalent disclosure of both upper and lower bounds removes this bias. These results suggest that experimental market reactions to these supplemental disclosures are inconsistent with market efficiency. Supplemental analyses of individuals' price predictions and trading behavior support our conclusion that inefficiencies are at least partially attributable to individual information processing biases.