This paper provides a rigorous analysis of the impact of training upon the employment growth characteristics of small and medium sized firms. Using appropriate statistical techniques to cope with sample selection biases and heterogenerous employment growth patterns it reveals that training is...

Notwithstanding their remarkable recent growth, surprisingly little research has hitherto been conducted on the evolving geography of professional and business services in Britain. This paper analyses the results of a detailed survey of 300 small and medium-sized management and engineering...

This paper examines the role of competition policy in emerging markets from a developmental and international perspective. Its main conclusion include: contrary to conventional wisdom, evidence suggests that the intensity of competition in leading emerging markets is certainly no less than that...

Innovative firms face two major kinds of risks in developing new technologies: competence destruction and appropriability. High levels of technical uncertainty and radical changes in knowledge in some fields generate high technical failure risks and make it difficult to plan research and...

The development and exploitation of new scientific and technological know-how is a prime engine of economic growth. Different innovation systems have developed different approaches to this problem and have built upon varying combinations of public and private support for R&D over time. In this...

In this paper the "exit, voice and loyalty" approach by Albert O. Hirschman is applied to the case of the rise and evolution of the Prato industrial district, from post-war days until now. This is done, not so much to gain a better understanding of the specific events in Prato, but rather to...

The aim of this paper is to reassess the place of labour law in the wider area of employment relations research and to argue the case for labour law's importance to social scientists. We give an analytical account of the principal institutional features of labour law as a form of legal...

The management of pay in Britain has changed substantially in recent years. The paper starts with a theoretical discussion of the extent to which individual employers can exercise discretion in the management of their employees' pay. It then examines the ways in which pay is used to secure...