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This study aims to elucidate the quantitative and qualitative differences in employment development between German districts. Building on ideas from competitive development and resource-based theory, the paper particularly seeks to explain enduring East-West differences between rural regions by two different forms of competitive advantage: cost leadership and quality differentiation.

This study follows a two-step empirical approach: First, an extended shift-share regression is conducted to analyze employment development in Western and Eastern German districts between 2007 and 2016. Second, the competitive share effect and other individual terms of the shift-share model are further examined in additional regressions using regional economic characteristics as exogenous variables.

The findings suggest that the above-average employment growth of the rural districts in the West is owed to the successful exploitation of experience in manufacturing that has been gathered by firms in the past 100 years or so. While their strategy is largely based on advanced and specialized resources and an innovation-driven differentiation strategy, the relatively weak employment development of Eastern rural districts might be explained by a lack of comparable long-term experiences and the related need to focus on the exploitation of basic and general resources and, accordingly, on the efficiency-based strategy of cost leadership.

This study offers an in-depth empirical analysis of how the competitive share effect, i.e. region-specific resources beyond industry structure, contributes to regional employment development. The analysis reveals that quantitative differences in rural employment development are closely related to qualitatively different levels of input factors and different regimes of competitiveness.

This article aims to investigate the financial constraints and nonlinearity of farm size growth.

Farm size growth is measured with land, labor and output using data from the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) for Hungary and Slovenia. A dynamic panel model is applied to assess financial constraints and nonlinearity of farm size growth.

Results show that, except for land in Slovenia and output in Hungary, liquidity constraints are less important for farm size growth than endogenous factors based on farm size growth expectations and steady farm size restructuring. Smaller farms are growing faster than larger ones. The hypothesis that a higher level of subsidies would increase farm size is not supported for Hungary. When farms reach a certain size, the land area of the largest farms increases. Farm debts in Hungary are linked with land growth and in Slovenia with output growth.

Further research on the impact of liquidity constraints and subsidies can be conducted at a disaggregate farm-type level to examine whether there is variability in the underlying interlinkages at the farm-type specialization level.

The implication that farm size growth is dependent on initial size and that smaller farms are growing faster than bigger ones indicates that it is not necessary to favor the fastest growing smaller farms thus supports the application of a non-discriminatory farm size policy for observing farm size structural changes.

The dynamic panel econometric model that incorporates cash flow as a measure of financial constraints provides insight into farm size growth in cross-country comparison in relation to potential farm liquidity constraints, farm debt and the nonlinearity of farm size, which information is of relevance to policy makers and practitioners.

This study explores the motivations underlying the European Super League (SL) breakaway attempt. While institutional settings bind football to tradition, investors conceive football companies as an opportunity to diversify their investments in a fast-growing technological industry. The study investigates the market structure and identifies the reasons behind the European football crisis, proposing to modify the role of Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) in the European football market.

After summarizing the unusual features of the European football market, the article displays the agents involved and their interrelations. Modeling the market facilitates picturing the misalignment of targets of regulatory bodies and football clubs. It also helps visualize the potential consequences of the SL coup on the market.

The market does not allow football companies to monetize their business and compete with other entertainment sectors. Only a radical change in the balance of power between clubs and self-interested institutional settings can settle this situation. Indeed, this relation leads to market inefficiency because the two most critical clubs' financial problems (the high dependence on broadcasting revenues and the uncontrolled expenditures on players' salaries) are linked to the same issue: the governing bodies strongly influence the profit equation by holding control of media rights and incentivizing clubs to overspend to win both on-field and off-field.

This study is the first to assess the football business market using an evolutionary approach to address its problems. It offers a visualizing tool to understand the market and proposes an alternative solution for solving the football market crisis.

Besides the extensive research on managerial efficiency in the financial sector worldwide, emerging economies in Europe remain untapped. This research scrutinises the impact of managerial performance and competitive structures on their financial industry growth in terms of services they offer and ability to liquefy stock in capital markets.

This study contains data from selected emerging European countries' during the period of 2010–2020. This study uses data from the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom to control for firm-level indicators. The fixed-effects (FE) method was used to explore the nexus between financial sector growth and management performance as well as competitive firm structure.

The findings provide evidence of the existing impact of firm indicators on the financial sector's growth. Two-step system the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimations are used for the robustness check of the authors' model. Whilst on a scavenger hunt through existing literature, the authors realise that there is an overwhelming lack of enthusiasm in this field.

With the intention of better assessment, the authors use regulatory contextual variables to look for any possible impacts and surprisingly discover a pattern in the financial growth nexus.

The organised self-help approach successfully enhances urban low-income earners' (LIE) homeownership in some developing countries. The technique can enhance urban resilience for sustainable LIE homeownership. There is a paucity of studies concerning sustainable homeownership for Nigeria's urban LIE through a self-help approach. The study investigated the housing needs of the urban LIE via organised self-help mechanisms and how the same can enhance urban resilience for sustainable homeownership in the Ancient City of Benin, Nigeria.

Given the unexplored nature of the issue, 20 face-to-face interviews were conducted with experts and analysed through a thematic approach.

Findings identified eleven main barriers faced by the urban LIE. This includes the absence of government housing policy, funding frameworks, urban land scarcity, high property development costs, naira devaluation, high-interest rates, inflation, bribery and corruption, lax mortgage sub-sector, high cost of infrastructure, and government bureaucracy.

This study will contribute to pioneering the role of organised self-help mechanisms in urban resilience for sustainable LIE homeownership in developing cities via a qualitative approach. Also, findings would significantly contribute to developing countries' sustainable housing and urban resilience literature.

This study aims to test the compensatory consumption theory with the explicit hypothesis that China's new-rich tend to waste relatively more food.

In this study, the authors use Heckman two-step probit model to empirically investigate the new-rich consumption behavior related to food waste.

The results show that new-rich is associated with restaurant leftovers and less likely to take them home, which supports the compensatory consumption hypothesis.

Understanding the empirical evidence supporting compensatory consumption theory may improve forecasts, which feed into early warning systems for food insecurity. And it also avoids unreasonable food policies.

This research is a first attempt to place food waste in a compensatory-consumption perspective, which sheds light on a new theory for explaining increasing food waste in developing countries.

Women’s empowerment remains a key development challenge in Kenya. The purpose of this study is to attempt to understand the status of women’s empowerment and the key contributors to their disempowerment in Kenya’s aquaculture sector.

A cross-sectional survey was conducted on 534 male and female fish farmers from 300 households drawn from six counties in Kenya (Kakamega, Kisumu, Kisii, Kiambu, Meru and Nyeri). The Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) was adapted to Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Fisheries and Aquaculture Index (A-WEFI) to suit the aquaculture and fisheries sub-sector. The adapted A-WEFI was then used to estimate and the status of women’s and men’s using five domains of empowerment (5DE) and a gender parity index (GPI). Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Cramer’s V and sensitivity analysis as test statistics.

About 86% of the men and 80% of the women were classified as empowered. The mean score of the 5DE was 0.93 and 0.95 for women and men, respectively. In addition, 82% of the households achieved gender parity, suggesting that for such households, empowerment of men was no greater than that of women. Overall, the results suggest no major differences between the empowerment of women and men. Findings suggest areas of improvement in empowerment: when observed separately, women report lack of agency in production, resource, time-use and allocation and leadership.

This paper adapts the A-WEAI to the fisheries and aquaculture context, in bid to bridge the gap in standard women’s empowerment measurement methods in this area. Also, there are limited empirical studies on the multifaceted empowerment of women in aquaculture in Kenya. The findings are meant to serve as a point of reference for policymakers, as they develop gender-responsive intervention programmes, and in implementing gender mainstreaming in Kenya.

This paper aims to better understand how business model innovation (BMI) occurs in the context of sustainable entrepreneurship, emphasizing the dialectical nature of entrepreneurial relationships. To do so, key interdependencies and reciprocal influences between internal/firm-specific and external/environmental factors underlying BMI for sustainability are analysed through co-evolutionary lenses.

A co-evolutionary framework is developed and applied to a longitudinal business model (BM) analysis of 15 Italian widespread hotels, which creatively use historic villages at risk of abandonment to establish their hotels.

Largely influenced by the interplay between internal and external factors, BMI of widespread hotels occurs through multilevel co-adaptations, which are recognised as virtuous by all stakeholders involved. Effective variations of the BM value elements are selected resulting in circular economy practices, which are retained for successful BMI, radical (first) and incremental (thereafter). Knowledge of specific local and multi-local conditions, time awareness and a future-oriented temporal perspective, by both entrepreneurs and policymakers, favour this dynamic.

Developing targeted policies and practices based on increased organisational knowledge supported by indicators can help in selecting and retaining successful variations of BMs appropriately in/with time with positive effects on firms' performance and sustainable development.

This study provides a novel co-evolutionary framework that explicitly links sustainable entrepreneurship and BM concepts in the accommodation sector. It further proposes a dynamic and holistic explanation of BMI for sustainability from which the crucial roles of the time-knowledge binomial and circular practices emerge.

This study aims to examine how knowledge sharing contributes to organizations’ ambidexterity, their overall performance and the role of knowledge quality in this relationship. Knowledge sharing is conceptualized based on tacit and explicit dimensions, and ambidexterity is viewed as comprising exploitative and explorative capabilities.

This study uses a cross-sectional survey-based research design and structural equation modeling to test the proposed model of knowledge sharing and knowledge quality in organizational ambidexterity and the related hypotheses.

The results indicate that tacit knowledge sharing has a significant, direct impact on the exploitative and explorative capabilities of the organization and indirectly impacts both dimensions of ambidexterity (i.e. exploitative and explorative) through knowledge quality. In contrast, explicit knowledge sharing does not have a significant impact on knowledge quality and affects only the exploitative extent of ambidexterity. Both exploitative and explorative capabilities significantly impact organizational performance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first study to empirically examine the role of knowledge quality in the context of knowledge sharing for ambidexterity, especially within the context of organizations in the United Arab Emirates.