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The purpose of this paper is to examine how doing business affects inclusive human development in 48 Sub-Saharan Africa for the period 2000–2012.

The measurement of inclusive human development encompasses both absolute pro-poor and relative pro-poor concepts of inclusive development. Three doing business variables are used, namely: the number of start-up procedures required to register a business, time required to start a business, and time to prepare and pay taxes. The empirical evidence is based on fixed effects and generalised method of moments regressions.

The findings show that increasing constraints to the doing of business have a negative effect on inclusive human development.

The study is timely and very relevant to the post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda for two fundamental reasons: first, exclusive development is a critical policy syndrome in Africa because about 50 per cent of countries in the continent did not attain the Millennium Development Goal extreme poverty target despite enjoying more than two decades of growth resurgence. Second, growth in Africa is primarily driven by large extractive industries and with the population of the continent expected to double in about 30 years, scholarship on entrepreneurship for inclusive development is very welcome. This is essentially because studies have shown that the increase in unemployment (resulting from the underlying demographic change) would be accommodated by the private sector, not the public sector.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of mobile money on savings and saving practices among individuals in Ghana.

Employing an instrumental variable (IV) estimation technique, comprehensive data from the Financial Inclusion Insight (FII) Survey is used, implemented by InterMedia company and conducted from December 2014 to January 2015 in Ghana.

It is found that mobile money use generally increases savings and saving behavior among individuals in Ghana. In particular, our results show that mobile money use increases the probability of individuals saving for business startup or business expansion, child's education and emergencies. Also, for the heterogeneous effects of mobile money use on saving practices, strong evidence that the use of mobile money is more pronounced in rural areas than in urban centers is found.

To the best of our knowledge, no empirical study has been done on Ghana to extensively examine how mobile money affects various saving practices in Ghana as it is done in this paper. The paper highlights the need for ongoing enhancement of financial inclusion in rural areas by the government of Ghana and other stakeholders to boost savings among rural folks, while not neglecting that in urban areas. Generally, the findings for this paper support the use of mobile money as a tool for enhancing the financial inclusion agenda by policymakers in Ghana and many other countries around the world.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the propensity to use e-government services in post-communist countries in the European Union.

A survey was conducted among 7,984 respondents from the states of Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The analysis focused on the following manifestations of e-administration usage in these countries: viewing websites run by public administration bodies, making contact with public administrations via e-mail, downloading the forms necessary to obtain a public service, sending completed electronic forms to appropriate offices, and contacting politicians, activists, or offices electronically to discuss matters important for a region or the whole state.

The results of the analysis presented in this paper show that there is a statistically significant relationship between the state of the respondent’s residence and the propensity to use particular forms of e-government.

Decision makers should create incentives to popularize electronic signatures, which are necessary to fully settle a matter in public offices via the internet. They could use financial assistance offered by the European Union to implement this technology. Moreover, they should award bonuses to private persons or entrepreneurs who use Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in their contact with the state administration, for example, by way of charging less for issuing a driving license, building permits, or other documents necessary to apply for a building permit. The use of ICT in the client-administration relationship would reduce corruption levels by limiting direct contact and allow for reconstruction of all of the digital records to apply for a given permit, document, etc.

With the rapid growth of internet (and e-commerce) worldwide, the public administration sector has many opportunities, especially in a developing democracy. The paper is unique because it shows data collected from almost 8,000 respondents and it presents a comparison of the use of e-government among citizens of nine European Union member states.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the joint effect of persistency in innovation and export on firms’ total factor productivity. In particular, the aim is to determine if exporting in international markets along subsequent periods, and being also continuously innovating over the same periods, can be associated with increases in firms’ productivity. The underlying idea is that time recurrence of these strategies is related to the firms’ ability to optimize external knowledge flows enhancing their productivity.

By using data on Italian manufacturing firms over the period 1998–2006, the authors distinguish between repeated and temporary exporting firms, as well as repeated and temporary innovators, to test (through two-step system generalized methods of moments) the existence of any combined learning-by-exporting and learning-by-doing effects.

This paper provides empirical findings about persistent innovation efforts being better associated with a permanent presence in foreign markets. More in detail, persistently innovative and exporting firms have better productivity results than persistently exporting (innovating) firms with non-persistent innovation (export). Combining both strategies could be an opportunity to internalize knowledge flows coming from long-lasting exposure to foreign markets. These results hold especially for small firms.

The novelty of this paper is twofold. First, the authors argue that the temporal dimension of firms’ exporting and innovating activities may influence firms’ productivity. Second, while previous studies explored the role of export and innovation on productivity in isolation, the authors consider the joint effect of this relationship and also explore it across the temporal dimension finding evidence that they have a positive, reinforced effects if firms implement these activities continuously and jointly. In this case, the effect of innovation and export on productivity is significantly higher than if firms with intermittent strategies do not have the time to internalize knowledge flows coming from participating in export market.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate firm behaviors on patent examination request under the deferred patent examination system in Korea. The authors examine firm decisions on whether and when to request patent examinations when they face both uncertainty about invention’s value and market competition.

The authors provide a simple theoretical model and test a couple of hypothesis using Korea patent data. The authors employ KIPO (Korean intellectual patent office) patent applications data during 2006–2009 and incorporate it with firm financial data retrieved from1 Korea investor service-financial analysis system (KIS-FAS) database in Korea. The authors use the variation in the probability of lapsed patent applications filed in the same year and in the same technology field (at the four-digit IPC class level) of a patent application i as a proxy for the value of uncertainty, and further use one minus a firm’s market share (at the three-digit SIC industry level) as an indicator of the market competition faced by the firm/applicant.

The authors find that the examination requests of firms in Korea have interesting bipolar distribution, and both uncertainty about an invention’s value and market competition have significant impacts on firm’s decision for examination request. Applicants tend to utilize option value of waiting when uncertainty is high, but market competition attenuates the option value: the higher the competition, the less likely applicants are to delay or forego examination.

The authors’ study makes interesting contributions to the literature on the optimal design of the patent system in general and the deferred patent examination request system in particular. By considering the roles of both uncertainty and market competition in firm decisions, it provides a more comprehensive perspective on the deferred patent examination system. The study also provides empirical evidences on the broader research topic regarding firm decision for irreversible investment when faced with both uncertainty and competition, for which a strand of theoretical literature exists but empirical literature is largely limited. This study, which explicitly takes into account uncertainty and market competition, extends this line of empirical literature and fills the gap in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to add to the existing literature about whether and how a continuous belief-update mechanism affects investors' risk perceptions in crowdfunding. The authors build on existing literature on the impact of a continuous belief-update mechanism on return expectations and risk perceptions, as a result of the funders' personal return and risk experiences, and apply this approach to the crowdfunding area. The authors thus add two specific insights about these dynamic new markets. First, the authors measure the perceived risk along multiple dimensions. Second, the authors consider how perceived risk differs across experienced investors and inexperienced investors, using two levels of analysis.

The paper uses a unique data set of survey respondents on crowdfunding with financial returns. The data set covers Germany, Poland and Spain. Survey data were derived by market research conducted in two stages. The first stage consists of two questions asked within an omnibus survey conducted by computer-assisted telephone interviews. In the second stage, multiple questions (including QA.1 and QA.2 and demographics) were included in an online survey or computer-assisted web interview for the same three countries.

The authors find that experienced investors perceive risks at lower levels than users that are aware of crowdfunding, but have not yet had the experience of an actual investment. The authors also find that investors, who invest larger proportions of their savings in crowdfunding with financial returns, perceive risks even lower than “lighter” investors, for the majority of risks the authors investigate.

The study is limited in three European countries and explores crowdfunding with financial returns only.

The study suggests that investors' participation and activity in crowdfunding with financial returns can be increased, either via providing incentives for “first investment” or via the creation of investment simulators.

This study contributes to the following three areas. First, the authors shed new evidence on the dynamics of crowdfunding with financial returns and explore how decisions are being made in a context of reverse information asymmetries. Second, the authors explore how the “crowd” reshapes risk perceptions via a belief-update mechanism; this is of high importance under the absence of traditional financial intermediaries, which increases the severity of information asymmetries. Third, the authors enrich literature associated with how laypeople take investment decisions, showing how prior experience affects investment decision making.

The aim of the research is to analyze sustainability in energy companies in terms of financial innovation, innovation strategy and organizational innovation.

The analysis of this research was done by using the Mplus 7 package program, and the research model was tested using the existing latent variables and their expressions. Data from 298 administrative staff (white collar) working in companies operating in the energy sector were analyzed.

Both independent and mediation effects of financial innovation and innovation strategy positively affect sustainability performance. Therefore, it can be concluded that in order for sustainability performance to be positive, importance should be given to financial innovation, innovation strategy and organizational innovation activities.

As the data were collected from energy companies in this research, it is not correct to generalize the evaluations. Therefore, in terms of the limitations of the research, the sector and sample size should be taken into account in future studies.

This research conducted in energy companies focuses on the importance of sustainability and has a unique value in the literature as the data is collected and analyzed from white-collar employees.

The birth and survival rate of youth-owned businesses has been a major concern for policymakers, industry and academics alike. Learning and innovation play important roles and more critical is the mediating factors and how it impacts the enterprise competitiveness of youth-owned businesses and hence worth studying. Therefore, this study aims to examine the impact of mediating factors such as government support, informal network society and external knowledge infrastructure on learning and innovation in youth-owned small businesses in Lagos, Nigeria, from a cross-sectional perspective.

Leveraging the sectoral system of innovation theory, we use a primary research method and data obtained from a structured questionnaire administered among a sample of 1,000 registered youth-owned small businesses in Lagos, while 30 in-depth interviews were also conducted. The exploratory factor analysis was used for data examination.

The findings show that even though government support, informal network society and external knowledge all have a positive relationship with learning and innovation in youth-owned small businesses, government support has the most impactful impact. The informal network society via a trade association, professional network and social media are also critical in knowledge transfer in youth-owned businesses.

The significance of learning and innovation is more important as many small businesses do not have the privilege of standard human resource management (HRM) systems. This paper looks at the mediating factors affecting the introduction of innovative practices in youth-owned and managed small businesses and how productivity is enabled in a developing county context.

This paper examines the relationship between the originality of a pharmaceutical innovation and its patent quality. Greater patent quality has been shown in the extant literature to enhance market value, which better enables firms to recoup research and development (R&D) expenditures incurred during the innovation process. Understanding how originality improves patent quality can assist policymakers, when determining the optimal length of pharmaceutical patent protection and/or market exclusivity.

The relationship between originality and patent quality is empirically investigated using a tobit, as well as a zero-inflated negative binomial, estimation approach to account for prevalence of patents receiving zero forward citations. Moderating effects of joint innovation, innovation by a university researcher and innovation by an established innovator on originality are also considered.

There is a robust and positive relationship between patent originality and quality in the pharmaceutical sector. This relationship is positively moderated by joint patent ownership with a university. As such, innovators that target originality in new drug development (especially those collaborating with universities) should, according to extant literature, see greater increases in their market value.

Policymakers can use information on the originality of a new drug to discern the optimal length of market exclusivity needed to enable the innovator to recoup expenditures related to R&D. Better predictions of the timing for which firms can recoup R&D expenditures will equip policymakers with knowledge about the appropriate timing to introduce competition into the market, which is critical to reducing the price of pharmaceuticals to consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the moderated effect of family involvement on the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT) and firm performance.

According to agency and transaction cost theories, distinctive family business characteristics provide a unique context that favours a more efficient use of ICT. The authors perform a multivariate analysis that includes the moderating effect of family involvement and considers the possible endogeneity of the ICT variable.

The results, using a large panel of Spanish manufacturing firms, confirm the importance of family involvement for explaining differences in terms of the impact of this technology in family and non-family businesses. The relationship between ICT and performance is stronger for family firms than for non-family firms.

The paper provides new evidence for the academic literature on ICT impact and family firms. It corroborates the importance of using an organizational perspective to explain differences in the effect of ICT on performance.

Family firms should understand the opportunities that family involvement offers regarding ICT impact on performance, and exploit this moderating effect to achieve competitive advantages.

No previous studies deal with the impact of family involvement on ICT-performance analysis. This study fills this gap and increases the understanding of how family business involvement moderates the ICT-performance relationship.

Este trabajo explora el efecto moderador de la participación familiar en la relación entre las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TIC) y resultados de la empresa.

De acuerdo con la teoría de Agencia y la teoría de los costes de transacción, las características distintivas de las empresas familiares proporcionan un contexto único que favorece un uso más eficiente de las TIC. Se lleva a cabo un análisis multivariante que incluye el efecto moderador de la participación de la familia y recoge la posible endogeneidad de la variable TIC.

Los resultados, obtenidos a partir de un gran panel de empresas manufactureras españolas, confirman la importancia de la participación de la familia para explicar las diferencias en términos del impacto de esta tecnología en las empresas familiares y no familiares. La relación entre las TIC y el rendimiento es más fuerte en las empresas familiares que en las no familiares.

El artículo proporciona nueva evidencia sobre el impacto de las TIC y sobre las particularidades de las empresas familiares. Se corrobora la importancia de utilizar un punto de vista organizativo para explicar las diferencias en el efecto de las TIC en el rendimiento.

Las empresas familiares deben entender las oportunidades que ofrece la participación de la familia en relación con el impacto de las TIC en el rendimiento, y explotar este efecto moderador para lograr ventajas competitivas.

No hay estudios previos sobre el efecto de la participación de la familia en el análisis del impacto de las TIC en el rendimiento. Este estudio ofrece evidencia al respecto y una mayor comprensión del papel moderador de la participación familiar en la relación TIC-rendimiento.