Ever since the arrival of the tomato to Spain in the 16th century, great diversification of the crop has taken place, giving rise to a rich collection of varietal types. The ‘Comunidad Valenciana’, with its deep-rooted agricultural tradition, is one of the Spanish regions with the greatest diversity in traditional tomato varieties, characterised by their local adaptation and high fruit quality....

It is perhaps not surprising that large and global corporate law firms have prospered in the latter parts of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. A broad range of literature has revealed that corporate law firms have grown in size and geographical reach thanks to their central role in lubricating financial markets and activities from currency trading and the work of hedge funds, to mer...

This paper analyzes the impact of heterogeneous (social) preferences on the weighting and combination of performance measures as well as on a firm’s profitability. We consider rivalry, egoism and altruism as extreme forms within the continuum of possible preferences and show that the principal can typically exploit both the altruistic and rivalistic behavior of his agents. Firm profits reach th...

This paper studies the capital structure dynamics of central and eastern European firms to better understand the quantitative and qualitative development of financial systems in this region. The dynamic model used endogenises the target leverage as well as the adjustment speed towards these targets. It is applied to microeconomic data for 10 countries. We find that during the transition process...

Uncertainty has qualitatively different implications than risk in studying executive incentives. We study the interplay between profitability uncertainty and moral hazard, where profitability is multiplicative with managerial effort. Investors who face greater uncertainty desire faster learning, and consequently offer higher managerial incentives to induce higher effort from the manager. In con...

Rumelt’s (1991) widely cited paper presents estimates of the relative influence of industry, corporate, business unit, and other influences on business unit profitability. He finds corporations explain almost none of the variability in business unit profitability. Using a simultaneous equation model, we provide alternative estimates of the influence of industry and corporation on business unit ...

Technology adoption in the Australian beef industry has been low and slow compared to that in the intensive livestock and cropping industries. Adoption needs to be higher and faster to fully capture the benefits from new beef genetic and other technologies. The principles of rapid improvement and innovation, and accelerated adoption, provide an innovative solution to this problem. In the Beef C...

National university hospitals are not different from private hospitals as the public role played by the former is not clearly defined in Korea. They have to compete with other general hospitals in the same region [1]. The introduction of the nationwide Korea Express Train has increased accessibility to medical institutions in the metropolitan area since 2003. This has resulted in an increased n...