This paper explores the determinants of debt maturity for a sample of 3306 non-financial listed firms from thirteen European countries (twelve countries of Euro Zone and United Kingdom) in 2011. According to literature, two sets of explanatory variables are included: (i) characteristics of firms...

Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) has been one of the fastest-growing areas of operations research during the last decades. The academic attention devoted to MCDA motivated the development of a great variety of approaches and methods within the field. These methods distinguish themselves...

As competition increases, Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing becomes an important issue in Portuguese industry. After a brief review of its history, elements, advantages and limitations, this paper presents the results of a postal questionnaire survey about JIT system sent to a sample of...

One important issue in firms’ governance is how to create incentives so that activity centres can become more efficient. In this paper, we first introduce an agency contract where the salary of the manager of an activity centre that produces an intermediate product is dependent of its...

Make-to-order companies, such as job shops, have been extensively studied. Some of those studies emphasise the importance of the workload control in order to improve manufacturing operations. In this paper a multiple decision-making scheme, with the purpose of planning and controlling operations...

Work flows in a job-shop are determined not only by the release load and the time between release factors, but also by the number of accepted orders. There has been extensive research on workload and input-output control aiming at improving the performance of manufacturing operations in...

The literature on clustering has highlighted several advantages of industrial agglomerations. Persons and firms benefit from the production and innovation activities of neighbouring companies in the same and related industries. Considering such benefits, Michael Porter states that clustering is...

Human capital is identified as one of the main determinants of economic growth and plays an important role in the technological progress of countries. Nevertheless, existing studies have to some extent neglected the importance of human capital on growth via the interaction it can have with a...

In the first part of this paper the effects of trade cycles on economic growth are discussed to test the hypothesis of autocatalytic trade cycles, which indicates that more innovation is produced in countries that are a part of these cycles. Using United Nations data, a trade network is...

Extensive literature on the contribution of knowledge spillovers to growth and development at the regional level exists but these studies mainly features regions characterised by a high level of economic development. This paper assesses the importance of knowledge spillovers for firms located in...