Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry costs or raise...

The decade of the 1940s was one of the darkest periods in the country's history, with years of famine, repression, general misery, and impoverishment of all aspects of national life ranging from culture to the economy. During those years plans were made to establish a Spanish motor industry once...

In the context of increasingly globalized markets, ever more complex supply chains and international manufacturing networks, corporate decision-making processes involve more and more actors, variables and criteria. This is a challenge for corporate head quarters. Many have argued that the role...

This paper examines the knowledge bases of the world's largest pharmaceuticals groups by sales. It puts forward the concepts of knowledge breadth and depth as the relevant dimensions along which knowledge bases can be mapped. Breadth is studied by analysing the evolution of specialisation by...

Whilst knowledge is a growing feature of corporate competitiveness and growth, it will make firms increasingly dependent on outside resources (including public and foreign resources), and will be increasingly disruptive to their internal organisation. This is because knowledge is increasingly...

This empirical paper analyses the importance of information and communications technologies (ICT) in the technological diversification trend among the world's large industrial firms. The objective of the research is twofold. First, to emphasise the emerging differences among technologies when...

This paper builds upon on-going research into the organisational implications of 'modularity'. Advocates of modularity argue that the Invisible Hand of markets is reaching activities previously controlled through the Visible Hand of hierarchies. This paper argues that there are cognitive limits...

This paper presents an Optimised Search Heuristic that combines a tabu search method with the verification of violated valid inequalities. The solution delivered by the tabu search is partially destroyed by a randomised greedy procedure, and then the valid inequalities are used to guide the...

To understand whether retailers should consider consumer returns when merchandising, we study how the optimal assortment of a price-taking retailer is influenced by its return policy. The retailer selects its assortment from an exogenous set of horizontally differentiated products. Consumers...