The impact of education,experience and inner circle advisors on SME performance: insights from a study of public development centers

In this study, we investigate the effects of entrepreneurial human capital on SME performance using data on 2,713 SMEs within the European Union. Performance was measured in two ways: profitability as ROA and productivity as revenue per employee. Results indicate that both profitability and productivity are positively related to industry-specific knowledge possessed by the CEO-owner prior to starting up the firm and the general business knowledge acquired once the firm is up and running. Experience as a result of having previously worked in a firm in the same industry before starting a business was related to productivity, but there is no relation with profitability. There is a link between performance and inclusion of other CEO-owners in the founder’s inner circle of advisors. This relationship is positive when the advisor’s venture has experienced failure and negative when the advisor’s venture has been successful. We discuss the significance of these findings for research and practice.     

凝八方之智推可持续增长2010夏季达沃斯论坛隆重开幕

省巢董事长包必达理解水有三个维度理解水有三个维度,要从社会品、环境水和商业水进行分析认识.我们必须理解水有三个纬度,首先是社会品,就是基本源泉,另外是从环境意义上的水,理论上我们需要4200立方升水,确保环境保持下去.     

Too-Big-To-Fail: Why Megabanks Have Not Become Smaller Since the Global Financial Crisis?

ABSTRACT

More than ten years after the global financial crisis, what has happened to the ‘too-big-to-fail’ (TBTF) banks whose reckless behavior was among its preconditions, but which received public support and guarantees in the midst of that crisis? Insofar as this too-big-to-fail status helped create the crisis and then imposed costs on the rest of society, we would expect these banks to have shrunk. We investigate the evolution of 31 global-TBTF banks and find that their overall size has hardly recorded any substantial change. However, there is no sense of urgency in the flourishing post-crisis literature on TBTF banks about the need to contain their size; the prevalent view therein is that if properly regulated, the risks that arise from a financial system dominated by TBTF banks are manageable. This view rests on the same overly narrow theoretical underpinnings whose flaws were exposed in the crisis. We argue that too-big-to-fail banking is embedded in a set of self-reinforcing policies—consolidation, balance-sheet support through quantitative easing, favorable regulations, bank lobbying, and geo-economic and geo-political considerations—which explain why these banks have not shrunk and why they remain a threat to financial stability, well after the lessons of the crisis should have been learned.     

Relative Effects of IFRS Adoption and IFRS Convergence on Financial Statement Comparability

One of the primary objectives of both adoption of IFRS and convergence between IFRS and U.S. GAAP is to increase financial statement comparability. Using a unique setting in Germany, we compare the effectiveness of these two approaches in achieving this desired outcome. Our empirical tests show that both adoption and convergence lead to an increase in comparability after the new enforcement regulation in 2005. However, difference‐in‐differences tests show that adoption does not lead to a significant incremental increase in comparability beyond convergence. The findings of this study should be of interest to regulators and standard setters as they assess alternative methods of aligning domestic standards with IFRS.     

Franchising and firm financial performance among U.S. restaurants

Franchising has attracted the attention of retailing and entrepreneurship scholars in the past three decades, but evidence pertaining to how franchising affects financial performance is mixed and inconclusive. Thus, the question remains as to whether franchising firms exhibit better financial performance than non-franchising firms in the same industry. In order to find an answer to this question, our study compares the risk-adjusted financial performance of franchising versus non-franchising restaurant firms over the 1995–2008 interval, using five different performance measures: the Sharpe Ratio, the Treynor Ratio, the Jensen Index, the Sortino Ratio, and the Upside Potential Ratio. For each measure, the results revealed that franchising restaurant firms outperformed their non-franchising counterparts. Thus, we provide very robust evidence that franchising is superior on average in the restaurant industry, which can help explain the increasing popularity of franchising as a business form.     

The Benefit Function Approach to Modeling Price-Dependent Demand Systems: An Application of Duality Theory

In this article, we advocate more extensive use of the benefit function in specifying price-dependent or inverse demand models. We demonstrate how duality theory may be used to establish the interrelationships between the Marshallian (or Hicksian) inverse demands and Luenberger's adjusted price functions, allowing estimable inverse demands to be derived directly from a benefit function. We estimate two systems of inverse demands for Japanese quarterly fish consumption. Results indicate that the procedures and methods employed here appear promising, and may prove beneficial for quantity and welfare analysis when modeling systems of inverse demand functions.     

Marketing Organic Pasta from Big Sandy to Rome: It's a Long Kamut ®

Bob Quinn spent 20 years propagating an ancient Egyptian wheat variety that is generally known as Khorasan wheat. Bob trademarked his wheat variety using the brand name "Kamut^®." Kamut^® brand wheat contains some nutritional, health, and taste advantages over modern wheat varieties, but lacks some of modern wheat's agronomic advantages. Kamut^® brand wheat is organically produced, and is used to make cereals, breads, cookies, snacks, pancakes, bread mixes, bulgur, pasta, and baked goods. Whole wheat products produced from Kamut^® brand wheat are less bitter than those produced from modern wheat varieties. Europe represents approximately two-thirds of the market for this product.     

The tragedy of the commons: property rights and markets as solutions to resource and environmental problems

In one way or another, all environmental and natural resource problems associated with overexploitation or under provision of public goods, arise from incompletely defined and enforced property rights. As a result private decision makers do not consider or internalize social benefits and costs in their production or investment actions. The gap between private and social net returns results in externalities – harmful effects on third parties: overfishing, excessive air pollution, unwarranted extraction or diversion of ground or surface water, extreme depletion of oil and gas reservoirs. These situations are all examples of the 'The Tragedy of the Commons'. In this paper, I consider options for mitigating the losses of open access: common or group property regimes, government tax and regulation policy, more formal private property rights. I briefly summarize the problems and advantages of each option and describe why there has been move toward rights-based instruments in recent years: ITQ (individual transferable quotas), tradable emission permits, and private water rights. Introductions to the papers in the special issue follow.