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Financial constraints limit firms' ability to invest in working capital, which results in opportunity costs from lost sales or stockouts. The author examines initial public offering (IPO) firms' working capital management and build on the idea that newly listed firms experience a liquidity shock that allows them to invest more in working capital.

The empirical results are based on a sample of European IPO firms matched with comparable non-IPO firms; the author uses the generalized method of moments panel-data regressions to test the hypotheses.

The author observes that IPO firms increase their inventories-on-sales ratio, accounts receivable-on-sales ratio and operating working capital after the IPOs, which is consistent with the idea that going public relaxes financial constraints and allows firms to adopt more conservative working capital management practices. The observed results are stronger for smaller firms and zero-debt firms, which are the most financially constrained firms.

The study shows that working capital requirements can be financed via equity and not only via debt, and can even motivate the decision to go public for financially constrained firms.

This paper aims to revisit the relationship between sales growth and profitability by exploring the direct and indirect effects of cost stickiness in the growth process. Cost stickiness refers to asymmetric variations of costs associated with increases and decreases in sales. Cost stickiness is analyzed as a strategic liability that negatively affects profitability because it contributes to organizational rigidity that causes opportunity costs.

The empirical design is based on a large sample of 65,599 French firms drawn from the Amadeus database and it covers the period 2010 to 2019. The authors take advantage of the presentation of expenses made by nature in Amadeus to calculate cost stickiness in a more direct way than what is commonly done in the literature. The authors use various regression models to test the hypotheses.

For firms that experience rapid growth in sales, cost stickiness has a positive moderating effect on the relation between sales growth and profitability because of a higher asset turnover efficiency. However, for firms that experience slow growth, no growth or a decrease in sales, cost stickiness plays a negative moderating effect on the relation between sales and profitability.

This work contributes to the discussion about the conditions under which high growth is associated with greater profitability and conceptualizes cost stickiness as a strategic liability. The empirical context, privately held firms, has been overlooked by previous research.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a Central-European perspective into the international discussion of the participatory place-making. The research focuses on the renewal of the large prefabricated housing estates, dominant type of urban housing in the area where after the privatisation process resident-owners own only a so-called floating plot under their block. In total, 80 per cent of the land of the whole neighbourhood remains public. The question is how participatory place-making works in this specific urban, social and cultural situation?

By introducing the topic from a theoretical point of view, the study is based on research conducted in Budapest’s Újpalota Housing Estate. Fieldwork, project analysis and interviews uncover the complexity of this Hungarian case where appropriation of residents, municipality and European social regeneration projects are simultaneously present with different types of participatory methods.

The majority of real changes in Újpalota – as well as in housing estates of post-Communist countries in general – are led by individual or common appropriation that sometimes becomes convincing participation. This informal transformation of the built or natural environment can create a small sense of place everywhere. At the same time, it can work against the architectural and urban character of a neighbourhood or a building, rendering a feeling of disorder.

The paper based on this Hungarian case shows that the real culture of participatory place-making is still missing in post-Communist context, and despite some good examples, the majority of people are inactive, waiting for changes to be made by leaders.