Supermarkets and hypermarkets already dominate the markets of some larger cities, and their continued expansion from major cities into smaller cities is expected to further drive competition in the grocery retail sector. Of the various retail channels, hypermarkets are expected to have the most growth potential in the Chinese market and are benefitting from consumer trends toward convenience an...

Most skills acquired through on-the-job training may be specific to an occupation and therefore transferable to some but not all firms. However, economists have typically focused on skills that are either specific to a given firm or skills that are completely general. This paper explores the relationship between the size of the local market for an occupation-specific skill and job-training outc...

We consider a broker who has to place a large order which consumes a sizable part of average daily trading volume. The broker’s aim is thus to minimize execution costs he incurs from the adverse impact of his trades on market prices. In contrast to the previous literature (see, e.g., Obizhaeva and Wang [A. Obizhaeva and J. Wang, J. Financial Markets, 16 (2013), pp. 1–32] and Predoiu, Shaikhet, ...

A thin market is a market with few buying or selling offers. The concept of market thinness, while general, is typically used in the context of financial markets. When the number of buying or selling offers is small, investors' trading positions are large relative to market size. Trading then requires price concessions and thus exerts an impact on prices. A thin market is characterized by low t...

This paper studies the inventive performance and profitability of small and medium sized firms (SMEs) that are “technology specialists” compared to the inventive performance and profitability of SMEs that are instead vertically-integrated. In this paper perspective, “technology specialists” are firms that specialize upstream in generating inventions and trade those inventions in disembodied for...

The transition from conventional power sources to renewable energy sources is taking place in a number of European countries. Electric energy storage has been proposed as an environmentally friendly solution to make this transition possible. This thesis analyzes the profitability of investing in a battery bank in Germany and the UK, using a real options model. The model determines the option va...

The paper investigates issues of scale equivalence and generalisability across different populations. This area of research is important because it allows for valid comparisons to be made when studies investigate the same constructs across qualitatively distinct populations. The study investigates the generalisability of the Narver and Slater (1990) and the Kholi, Jaworski and Kumar (1993) mode...

We consider the trade-offs in the choice between depth (a narrow high quality position) and breadth (a wide low quality range). In particular, the extent of depth or breadth in a market can be non-monotonic in the strength of competition.