In this study, the empirical evidence regarding small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) growth determinants allows us to conclude that: (1) stimulating factors are cash flow and gross domestic product; (2) restrictive factors are: debt, firm size, age of the firm and the interest rate; and (3) in the period after 2008, the financial crisis and implementation of austerity measures, in the Portuguese context, produced a negative effect on SME growth. In the period 2008–2012, that is, after the beginning of the financial crisis, cash flow had less importance, while debt was found to have a stronger negative effect on SME growth, compared with the pre-crisis period.

The study investigates demographic diversity, cognitive diversity and internal diversity within Islam among top-level management of firms and their impacts on the financial performance of Malaysian-listed companies. In addition, Muslim and non-Muslim women and Islamic religious diversity on corporate boards are investigated. Even though numerous organisations desire to be socially diverse, the significance of diversity for organisational performance remains uncertain. Are profitable companies inclined to improve board diversity or do other characteristics of the company contribute to firm performance? Does the participation of Muslim and non-Muslim women on corporate boards affect firm performance? Does internal diversity within Islam affect firm performance? Data from 330 Malaysian-listed companies in eleven full fledged sectors were used for the period from 2009 to 2013. This study employed econometrics methodology from panel data analysis to fill the research gap in the current management literature. This study used the interaction approach to examine empirically diverse corporate boards and their impacts on firm performance. This discussion included: (1) a combination of gender diversity and ethnic diversity and (2) a combination of gender diversity and foreign participation. The findings suggest that demographic, cognitive and internal diversity within Islam are significant predictors of a firm’s financial performance. Ethnic women on boards have a significant and negative impact on firm performance. Hence, companies having high profits are more accountable for encouraging diversity among top-level management.

China is now poised to achieve its national aspiration of becoming an innovation economy. As it seeks to greatly increase equality in wealth creation, it also aims to assert global leadership in the development of all transforming economies, lead an expansion of international trade, and contribute to global environmental security policies. President Xi Jinping gave voice to these aspirations in his opening speech to the nineteenth national congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2017.

Management and Organization Review (MOR) is announcing a renewed initiative that seeks to attract and publish research embodying engaged indigenous scholarship in the context of transforming economies. Tsui (2004: 501) defines ‘indigenous research’ as ‘scientific studies of local phenomena using local language, local subjects, and locally meaningful constructs, with the aim to test or build theories that can explain and predict . . . phenomena in the local social cultural context’. By scientific studies, she emphasizes the need for high-quality indigenous research as judged by the scientific community.

Modern portrayals of human action are overwhelmingly in a calculative and consequentialist tradition. Consequentialist reasoning is the basis for most of modern social and behavioral science and preeminently for economics. Action is seen as choice, and choice is seen as driven by anticipations, incentives, and desires. These ideas trace their roots at least to the Greeks, owe substantial parts of their modern manifestation to the formulations of Jeremy Bentham, and derive much of their contemporary power from the geniuses of L. J. Savage and John von Neumann.

This paper presents an evaluation of the use of environmental valuation – techniques to assign monetary values to environmental impacts of policies and projects, especially nonmarket impacts – in U.K. policy. In doing so, we seek to contribute to the debate, more generally, of the use and influence of benefit-cost analysis (BCA) in national policy processes such as Impact Assessment. Specifically, our contribution in this paper is two-fold. First, we identify a number of trends that have characterized U.K. policy use of environmental valuation over the past two or so decades. While this has notably involved development of “sharable values” allowing more widespread uptake, it also seems that different branches of government have developed different traditions of use adding nuance to what, on the face of it, is otherwise a shared endeavor. Second, we evaluate the extent to which the use of environmental valuation can be said to have influenced policy decisions and the degree to which this is embedded by evolving policy processes. As such, we discuss two areas of environmental policy – water quality improvements and natural capital – which have entailed either substantial use of environmental valuation either in determining specific policy and investment project options or where this has helped shape the broader policy agenda. Our evaluation is not exhaustive; nor do our findings suggest that environmental valuation and BCA are necessarily the dominant driver of decisions, as we discuss. However, in recognizing this, we argue it is also important to consider a number of established or evolving cultural and legal institutional processes which broadly appear to support our assessment of such cases.

Exploiting differential interstate-branching deregulation across contiguous counties of adjacent states, we investigate the effect of entry threat on incumbent banks’ loan-loss provisions. Incumbents exposed to entry threat have offsetting incentives; lower provisions make their loan-underwriting quality appear better, deterring entry, but make local economic conditions appear better, encouraging entry. We find that the incentive to increase apparent loan-underwriting quality dominates on average. We further find that this incentive is stronger in counties with a higher proportion of heterogeneous loans, while the other incentive dominates in counties with both low heterogeneous loans and highly volatile economic conditions.