We explore whether the introduction of trust based working hours is related to the subsequent innovation performance of firms. Employing a panel data set of over 5,000 German establishments, we implement a propensity score matching approach where we only consider firms that did not use trust...

This paper reports the findings of a longitudinal study into manufacturing performance, lean production principles and buyer supplier relations in the Japanese, US and UK automotive industries. A total of 26 first tier component makers in the three countries were subject to detailed benchmarking...

The formation of new firms is an important determinant of economic development and the industrial organization literature highlights agglomeration as one of the main factors affecting the formation and scale of operations of new firms. This paper is one of the first to use developing country...

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...

There is growing evidence of the importance of co-operation between managers and workers for improving industrial performance. One manifestation of this is the growing use of human resource management (HRM) strategies to increase the involvement of employees. The survey of small and medium sized...

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 explores the impact of management characteristics and patterns of collaboration on a firmÕs innovation performance in transforming innovation resources into commercially successful outputs. These questions are investigated using a recent firm level survey database for 465 innovative...

This paper investigates whether government support can act to increase exporting activity. We use a uniquely rich data set on Irish manufacturing plants and employ an empirical strategy that combines a non-parametric matching procedure with a difference-in-differences estimator in order to deal...

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...

After a brief recent empirical sketch of Islamic finance, the paper turns to its main theoretical and conceptual purpose. It seeks to relate the concepts of Islamic and conventional finance, and to examine certain important questions which arise from the interaction between these systems. The...