Since 1997 the Hong Kong (HK) government has markedly changed its role from being a mere institution provider to being an active innovation promoter. As such, it has actively implemented innovation policies that focus especially on creating new funding opportunities and establishing several R&D...

This paper investigates the role of personal relationships for doing business in the Greater Pearl River Delta, China. First, it discusses the interplay of formal and informal (relationship-based) institutions from the point of view of institutional economics, with a focus on economies with weak...

This paper studies the determinants of the export activity of family SMEs, disentangling the three main dimensions that comprise the concept of familiness: power, experience, and culture. The results, using the F-PEC scale over a sample of 500 Spanish SMEs, show that this approach identifies the...

Relationship banking involves the provision of financial services by an intermediary that a) invests in obtaining customer-specific information, often proprietary in nature; and b) evaluates the profitability of these investments through multiple interactions with the same customer over time...

This paper studies the impact of research and development (R&D) and innovation on employment growth, focusing on small and medium-sized firms. Employment effects of R&D and innovation are unclear a priori as process innovation may be labor-saving or labor might have complementarities with other...

This paper proposes and estimates a two-step methodology to measure international managerial skill and calculate its impact on firm performance, using a sample of the biggest private Colombian exporting firms. The first step quantifies the manager’s organizational capital contribution to...

This paper presents a novel methodology to measure international managerial skill, which has not been directly measured in the specialized management quality surveys. The international managerial quality variable captures the manager’s organizational capital contribution to improve production...

Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2008) demonstrate that estimation of the standard adjustment model with country-fixed and time-fixed effects removes the statistical significance of income as a causal factor of democracy. We argue that their empirical approach must produce insignificant...

As consumer demand for organic food grows, organic certification is increasingly promoted in many developing countries. Organic products earn a premium price on the market compared to conventional varieties. Hence, organic production is often seen as a valuable alternative for developing...

As consumers’ demand for organic products and especially organic food grows, organic certification for tropical fruit is increasingly promoted in many developing countries. Certified organic pineapple exports only started taking off after 2005 and are rapidly increasing. The organic and...