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Take the image of the entrepreneur as a driven accepter of risk, an individual (or set of individuals) hungry to amass a fortune as quickly as possible. This image is consistent with the traditional finance theory view of entrepreneurial startups, one that assumes that profit maximization is the firm’s sole motivation (Chaganti, DeCarolis & Deeds, 1995). Myers’s (1994) cost explanation of the pecking order hypothesis (i.e. entrepreneurs prefer internally generated funds first, debt next, and external equity last) incorporates this economically rational view of entrepreneurs’ financing preferences. According to this view, information asymmetry and uncertainty make the availability of external financing very limited and the cost of it prohibitively high. To compensate, entrepreneurs must give up greater and greater control in order to “buy” funds needed to achieve the desired growth and profitability. Indeed, Brophy and Shulman (1992, p. 65) state, “Those entrepreneurs willing to relinquish absolute independence in order to maximize expected shareholder wealth through corporate growth are deemed rational investors in the finance literature.” Undoubtedly, cost and availability explanations of financing choices are valid for many new and small businesses. However, many entrepreneurship researchers have long been dissatisfied with the incompleteness of this perspective.

Purpose – The major question posed in this paper is whether public finance management (PFM) reforms undertaken by development partners (DPs) and the Ministry of Health (MOH) in Ghana were to find solutions to the many PFM challenges or it was merely a façade to pursue latent political interest?

Methodology – Study information was gathered via a desk review of major PFM policy documents, procedures, manuals, guidelines, and findings of commissioned studies covering the period under review. Information generated from the desk review was triangulated via extensive interviews with a sample of policy makers from MOH and DPs.

Findings – The findings suggest that MOH and DPs pursued reforms mostly to address the PFM challenges in the sector. Additionally, the study finds questionable the attitude and posture of the two actors and calls for further investigations to unearth what the said attitude and posture may imply in terms of intentions.

Originality/value – The findings raises fundamental question regarding public sector – DPs collaborations in executing reforms. This could open up new frontiers for further research to better understand DPs/public sector collaboration in the implementation of reforms.

Limitations – The sample used for this study may constrain generalization to other jurisdiction. This limitation does not in any case invalidate the conclusions arrived at.

This paper focuses on the potential advantages of strategic investment models in examining firm investment behavior. Strategic investment models are derived from rigorous modeling techniques grounded on formal analytical models, and they have been widely applied in corporate finance and economics to examine the problem of firm underinvestment. In this paper, we present an overview of strategic investment models, including empirical applications that highlight their methodological strengths. We conclude that the empirical application of such investment models in the context of strategic management research presents research opportunities in many new directions.

Russia's size – both in terms of population and geography, spanning 11 time zones, 89 oblasts (states or regions) and autonomous republics and its privatization program, encompassing some 100,000 small-scale enterprises, 25,000 medium to large firms, and 300 or so of its largest firms, made its privatization program the largest sale/transfer of assets conducted among the transition economies, with the possible exception of China. Comparisons by many of the program's critics, and there are many, to Poland, Hungary, or the Czech republic are invidious, especially the latter two countries whose populations are similar to just that of greater Moscow.

The chapter examines whether the lowering of dividend taxes as part of the US Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA) resulted in an increase in dividend payouts at the expense of research and development (R&D) spending. Using 1,206 US firm-years data, we find that R&D investments responded negatively to higher levels of dividend payout in the post-JGTRRA of 2003 tax regime compared with the pre-regime. We also find that R&D intensity and financial constraint moderate this negative relation. That is, this relation only holds for firms in low R&D-intensity industries and firms facing high levels of financial constraint. From a tax policy perspective, even though the tax cut on dividend receipts has the benefit of lowering the cost of equity capital, the benefit appears to have come at the expense of R&D investment.

Tertiary education in Ghana has seen rapid advancement over the past two decades. This growth is the result of transformative policy reforms such as upgrading polytechnics into higher education status; the establishment of the University of Development Studies (UDS) in the northern part of the country; the amalgamation of existing Colleges of Education into degree awarding institutions; the creation of the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) to provide supplementary financial support for infrastructure, faculty research and development; expansion of distance education programs; modification of the student loan scheme; and a conducive regulatory environment that encourages private sector participation in higher education provision. In spite of these developments, the system continues to face several challenges such as limited funding to support academic programs; limited participation rates for low-income students, females, and minorities; difficulty recruiting and retaining young academic and research faculty; inadequate research capacities; limited ICT infrastructure to enhance instruction and curriculum delivery and inadequate facilities to support science and technology education; etc. This chapter focuses on the state of public higher education in Ghana with emphasis on current growth and challenges. The chapter offers descriptive analysis based on government policy reports and documents, enrollment data from universities in Ghana, and data from the Ministry of Education and the National Council for Tertiary Education in Ghana.

This paper investigates whether tax incentives can effectively promote capital investment and research spending simultaneously. Tax history provides the experimental setting to compare the influences of these tax initiatives. Analysis shows that firms respond to the research tax incentives by increasing R&D spending but do not significantly react to the policies promoting greater capital investment. More importantly, the results indicate that the tax incentives are negatively related to other types of investment with reduced R&D spending in the presence of incentives for capital investment and capital expenditures decreasing when research is encouraged by tax policy.

This chapter intends to examine the relationship between government incentives and the mode of firms’ finance of their operation in Nigeria. Specifically, it does relate the solvency of the firm with the quality of their financing decisions and observed if government incentives such as creation of export processing zones and industrial parks will affect the firm’s decision of depending on external versus internal financing.

The results presented in this chapter are based on analysis of a firm-level data taken from the 2014 firm-level survey of the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey project for Nigeria. Different estimation techniques are applied for robustness and sensitivity. They include both the parametric and non-parametric regression approach.

The robust estimations show that firms that benefit from the government incentives tend to use more of internal funding to finance their operation unlike firms that are non-beneficiaries. In addition smaller firms are going to benefit more from the incentives than older firms, and less profitable firms are also going to use more of internal financing if they benefit from government incentives.

This chapter will be helpful for both research and teaching for undergraduate and post-graduate students. Importantly, its analysis and result will be useful for policy makers and their allies.

This chapter discusses solvency issues by considering the financing decision of firms, which is an important aspect in the going concern of firms.

Shareholder dividends are “rents”: they are paid out of a producer's surplus that, in a fully competitive market, would not exist. In any market system, no one has a right to rents. Why, then, do shareholders receive dividends? Most likely, share gains have been the result of the usefulness of the share-centered ideologies in justifying a tremendous shift of corporate wealth from employees to an alliance of top managers and shareholders. This alliance now shows signs of breaking down, as the managers learn they no longer need the ideological cover. Standard accounts conceal the struggle over corporate surplus and the weakness of shareholder claims to appropriate it. Recognizing that distribution of corporate surplus is a political struggle is the first step towards a less ideologically blindered discussion of how that struggle ought to be structured.