Small business support is an important element of industrial development policy in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. This paper examines the effect of grant support on small business performance from 1991-95. Around 50 per cent of small businesses in Northern Ireland and 30 per cent of small businesses in the Republic of Ireland received support over this period. In Northern Ir...

This paper provides the first evidence for discriminatory behaviour against female consumers in annuity market. It focuses on Chile, where an electronic bidding system allows retirees to receive offers, simultaneously from several firms market same standardised product. By exploiting within-individual variation initial offers across firms, this analysis shows that with power offer more unfairly...

Exports and Profitability: First Evidence for German Manufacturing Firms Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal data at the enterprise level for Germany, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and profitability. It documents that the positive profitability differential of exporters compared to non-expo...

Firms faced with the decision of whether to standardize or not prior to introducing a new network technology face a tradeoff: Compatibility improves the technology’s chances of consumer acceptance, but it also means having to share the resulting profits with other sponsors of the standard. In this paper, we show that even prior to market introduction of a new technology, the timing of decisions...

Global competition, ever-increasing customer demands and rising development costs are altering the way business is being conducted. The dot-com bubble burst has had little if any impact on developments on the business-to-business side of eBusiness. Firms are aware they have no choice but to develop stronger and closer ties with suppliers on the buy-side and with their business customers on the ...

The recent fall of labor’s share of GDP in numerous countries is well-documented, but its causes are poorly understood. We sketch a ”superstar firm” model where industries are increasingly characterized by ”winner take most” competition, leading a small number of highly profitable (and low labor share) firms to command growing market share. Building on Autor et al. (2017), we evaluate and confi...

Research that examines entrant-incumbent dynamics often points to the organisational limitations that constrain incumbents from successfully pursuing new technologies or fending off new entrants. Some incumbents are nevertheless able to successfully implement organisational structures and develop routines that overcome these institutional constraints. We provide a case-study analysis of how thr...

In many markets, competing but differentiated firms offer a product line in order to target each product to a different type of customer. Under competition, firms, while trying to target different products to different segments, are also interested in "stealing" customers from the competitors and, in particular, customers from the most profitable segments. How should a profit-maximising firm al...

Emission allowances are often distributed for free in an early phase of a cap-and-trade scheme (grandfathering) to reduce adverse effects on the profitability of firms. If the grandfathering scheme is phased out over time, firms may nevertheless relocate to countries with a lower carbon price once the competitive disadvantage of their home industry becomes sufficiently high. We show that this i...

We investigate whether acquiring firms make more profitable acquisitions when target firms’ financial statements are comparable with their industry peers. replicate the original sample of Chen et al. (2018) and extend to most recent year. find that experience higher announcement returns, acquisition synergies better post-acquisition operating performance targets statement comparability. Our res...