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The present study aims to identify the determinants of the capital structure of restaurants firms in Portugal, as well as to analyze the application of capital structure theories in those companies.

In order to reach the objectives, a sample of 400 companies belonging to the restaurant sector was used. The analysis was carried out between 2008 and 2017, and multiple linear regression, based on panel data, was applied.

The obtained results allowed to verify that the considered variables have different effects on the capital structure of the companies under study and that the restaurant sector partially applies the trade-off, pecking order and signaling theories.

Our chapter discusses the myriad ways in which Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (RUP) has been incorporated by different streams of scholarship dedicated to institutional analysis since 1990, when bibliometric evidence indicates a revival of interest in his classic work. Using citation analysis, the authors identify clusters of scholarship that build on Knight’s contributions, assessing which of his insights were absorbed by different subfields and how these have been connected to recent topics and concerns. The authors then qualitatively explore these results to throw new light on the recent history of institutional economics, using Knight’s RUP as a window into the evolution of (and inter-relations between) different research traditions that currently populate the field, including new economic sociology, comparative politics, evolutionary economics, entrepreneurial studies, environmental social sciences, international political economy, and the anthropology of finance. The authors conclude that Knight’s legacy remains unsettled, with different groups selectively absorbing a subset of his ideas and developing them in relative isolation from research conducted elsewhere. Nevertheless, boundary work connecting these separate areas reveals possible spaces for collaboration among scholars who study institutions building explicitly on Knightian insights.

This note offers new archival insight into a 1925 polemical exchange between Frank Knight and John Maurice Clark that was hosted in the pages of Journal of Political Economy. Although the exchange centered on the effects of overhead costs on marginal productivity theory and the so-called adding-up theorem, it also provided significant elements to assess the methodological differences between two of the most representative American economists of the interwar years.

I have been asked to explore how James Buchanan’s work on public finance and constitutional political economy might have emerged out of themes present in Frank Knight’s oeuvre, especially his Risk Uncertainty, and Profit. Buchanan’s body of work has inspired the development of a style of political economy sometimes described as Virginia or Constitutional Political Economy to distinguish it from the Chicago Political Economy with which George Stigler is associated, and with Stigler and Buchanan both being students of Knight. While Buchanan, unlike Stigler, did not write his dissertation under Knight’s supervision, this is a minor distinction because Buchanan regarded Knight as his de facto supervisor even though Roy Blough was his de jure supervisor. The author explains how Knight’s scholarly oeuvre can in large measure be detected in Buchanan’s effort to fashion an alternative approach to public finance and to articulate the field of study now called constitutional political economy.

In 1933, Lionel Robbins asked Frank Knight if he could republish Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (RUP) in order for students at the London School of Economics to continue to have access to the book. He also asked Knight to write a preface to provide an update on Knight’s changing economic views. Between 1933 and 1957, Knight wrote four new prefaces for reprint editions of RUP outlining changes in his views. In the prefaces, he identified four aspects of the theory expounded in RUP that he came to reject: (a) the method of successive approximation; (b) the separation of production from distribution; (c) the tri-partite division of the factors of production; and (d) any notion of a period of production. These rejections placed him squarely in opposition to F. A. Hayek’s theoretical work. He also identified the key features he had sought to develop in a monetary theory that would oppose J. M. Keynes and John Hicks. At the same time, he sought to identify the new theoretical ideas he was developing, including an enterprise-based theory of market exchange, and the adoption of a unitary resource, called capital. He also pointed to the work in social philosophy that he had begun in the 1940s, especially the need for a combined approach to social science using economic theory, ethics and social philosophy. The prefaces came to serve as a bridge between Knight’s original theory and what he would argue at the conclusion of his career.

This chapter documents how eugenics, scientific racism, and hereditarianism survived at Harvard well into the interwar years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Thomas Nixon Carver and Frank W. Taussig published works in which they established a close nexus between an individual’s economic position and his biological fitness. Carver, writing in 1929, argued that social class rigidities are attributable to the inheritance of superior and inferior abilities on the respective social class levels and proposed an “economic test of fitness” as a eugenic criterion to distinguish worthy from unworthy individuals. In 1932, Taussig, together with Carl Smith Joslyn, published American Business Leaders – a study that showed how groups with superior social status are proportionately much more productive of professional and business leaders than are the groups with inferior social status. Like Carver, Taussig and Joslyn attributed this circumstance primarily to hereditary rather than environmental factors. Taussig, Joslyn, and Carver are not the only protagonists of our story. The Russian-born sociologists Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin, who joined the newly established Department of Sociology at Harvard in 1930, also played a crucial role. His book Social Mobility (1927) exercised a major influence on both Taussig and Carver and contributed decisively to the survival of eugenic and hereditarian ideas at Harvard in the 1930s.