Co-operatives play a major role in the agricultural and food industry. Co-operatives, by the very nature, are producer-oriented firms. As market conditions for food products have changed in recent decades, the question is raised whether co-operatives are still efficient organisations for carrying transaction with agrifood products? Bijman (2002) has addressed this question for the fresh produce...

Financing constrains on investment are mainly important for small privately owned firms. Yet most of the investment literature focuses on the financing constraints of large publicly owned firms. This paper develops a financing constraints test based on a variable capital investment equation. Because it does not require the information about marginal q, the test can be easily applied to small fi...

This paper examines the role of spillovers and externalities in influencing the recent siting of foreign-owned R&D activities in European regions. In accordance with the literature on knowledge creation in MNCs, we find that location of foreign-owned research tends to agglomerate, depending upon the potential for the following different sources of spillovers and externalities: (i) intra-industr...

Despite widespread belief that membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) improves the quality of governance, there is no convincing empirical evidence. Here, we investigate whether WTO membership has a causal effect on firm-level reports of political corruption using a nonparametric partial identification approach to bound the average treatment effect (ATE). We also analyze conditional A...

Innovation and learning are both considered vital for a firm’s ability to prosper. In studies of organizational culture, the family-owned business is a unique context that provides the opportunity to study the tension between exploitation and exploration in the learning and innovation processes. Organizational stories are one way in which cultures are sustained over time. This paper examines ho...

The search for strategies to mitigate undesirable economic, ecological, and social effects of harmful resource consumption has become an important, socially relevant topic. An obvious starting point for businesses that wish to make value creation more sustainable is to increase the utilization rates of existing resources. Modern social Internet technology is an effective means by which to achie...

We analyze the differences between companies owned by private equity (PE) investors and similar public companies. We document that PE-owned companies provide higher managerial incentives to their top management: CEOs have almost twice as much equity, 10% lower salary, and more cash compensation than their counterparts at comparable public corporations. We also find some evidence that PE ownersh...

Given the growing US population and its relatively stable supply of publicly owned forests, it seems likely that future demand for outdoor recreation will be increasingly satisfied by privately owned forests. Therefore, it becomes important to understand whether visitors to publicly and privately owned forests have different characteristics. Using data from a US household survey, we found that ...

This study examines the impacts of debt financing on the firms’ investment decisions by employing the method of the multiple linear regression on the data from 2006-2008 of 60 Chinese real estate listed companies. We obtain three major findings. First, there is a negative relation between debt financing and investment behavior in both firms with low-growth opportunities and high-growth opportun...

We examine the relationship between the degree of foreign ownership and performance of recipient firms, using of panel of 21,582 Chinese firms over the period 2000-2005. We find that joint-ventures perform better than wholly foreign owned and purely domestic firms. Although productivity and profitability initially rise with foreign ownership, they start declining once foreign ownership reaches ...