Firms reduce the marginal cost of communicating technical knowledge by “formalizing” it in standards, dominant designs or other ways. But this only pays when new technology is sufficiently developed. In a simple model with endogenous communication costs, two equilibria emerge. With...

The concept of Smart City is considered increasingly strategic for the solution to the questions related to the irreversible urban agglomeration growth. Created in the nineties in parallel to the liberalisation process of telecommunications and the development of internet services, this...

The increasingly ample orientation of the companies towards the intellectual capital is based on the rediscovery of this resource with (almost) unlimited potential, generating economic benefits for a company. Given its importance, the information needs of stakeholders on this line have...

The Taiwanese venture capital industry has played a critical role in the development of the Taiwan it industry. The purpose of this study is to construct and prioritize the intellectual capital measures of venture capital in Taiwan and to formulate a strategy map based on these measures. A...

When the production of high quality goods needs the employment of qualified labour, firms’ decisions concerning quality are affected by the extent to which skills are abundant. By means of a comparison between monopoly and perfect competition, we show how market power in such a context may...

Practising is a matter of increasing the reliability of ones skills rather than relying on a tool or a strike of genius to get it right. Once perfection has been achieved the individual will aim for higher quality since the effort is more likely to be worthwhile. Furthermore because the returns...

Professional standards vary across professions and also change over time. One profession which has remained perfectionist is classical music, where the amount of practising is striking compared with other professions. Practising is a matter of increasing the reliability of ones skills rather...

We study the economics of employment relationships through theoretical and empirical analysis of an unusual set of firms, large law firms. Our point of departure is the “property rights” approach that emphasizes the centrality of ownership’s legal rights to control important, non-human...

In practice, two types of tournaments can be distinguished - U-type and J-type tournaments. In U-type tournaments, workers receive prizes that have been fixed in advance. In J-type tournaments, the employer fixes an aggregate wage bill in advance, which is then shared among the workers according...

This paper examines the relationship between the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector and economic growth for an annual panel of Brazilian states for the period 1985-2004. We investigate the importance of the relative size of the SME sector measured by the share of the SME employment in...