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[...]in OECD countries, SMEs account for about 99% of firms and 70% of all jobs (OECD, 2017). [...]ensuring their continued profitability and successful corporate governance can be key to our future prosperity. Fieldwork-based evidence of the use of management accounting in managing and measuring performance, Financial accounting being used as a tool for discharging accountability, Explorations of stakeholder identification and needs and the ways in which these are addressed, Challenges faced by SMEs in the post-COVID era, and how they are using accounting to help them overcome difficulties, The use of new technologies to assist internal governance and control or to create new strategic outreach or internationalisation opportunities and Commitments to sustainable business practices and accountability thereof. [...]integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) into the management control systems (MCSs) of SMEs has been found to play a role in the relationship between CSR initiatives and organisational performance (Cheffi et al., 2021).

[...]in OECD countries, SMEs account for about 99% of firms and 70% of all jobs (OECD, 2017). [...]ensuring their continued profitability and successful corporate governance can be key to our future prosperity. Fieldwork-based evidence of the use of management accounting in managing and measuring performance, Financial accounting being used as a tool for discharging accountability, Explorations of stakeholder identification and needs and the ways in which these are addressed, Challenges faced by SMEs in the post-COVID era and how they are using accounting to help them overcome difficulties, The use of new technologies to assist internal governance and control or to create new strategic outreach or internationalisation opportunities and Commitments to sustainable business practices and accountability thereof. [...]integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) into the management control systems (MCSs) of SMEs has been found to play a role in the relationship between CSR initiatives and organisational performance (Cheffi et al., 2021).

This paper develops a real options decision support tool for raising the performance of the firm. It shows how entrepreneurs can use our intuitive tool quickly to assess the nature and type of action required for improved performance. This exploits our estimated econometric relationship between precipitators of entrepreneurial opportunities, time until exercise, and firm performance. Our 3D chromaticity plots show how staging investments, investment time, and firm performance support entrepreneurial decisions to embed, or to expedite, investments. Speedy entrepreneurial action is securely supported with this tool, without expertise in econometric estimation or in formulae for real options valuation.

This paper argues that Coase provides the primary 20th century exemplar of the grounding of analytical developments in economics in direct fieldwork observation. In particular, his focus on the business enterprise, its internal functions (including decision-making), and its external relations (including contracting) has provided a stimulus for radical developments in microeconomics and in managerial and decision economics in particular. The argument is developed by a stylization of the development of economics, referring to Adam Smith in the 18th century, Alfred Marshall in the 19th century, Ronald Coase in the 20th century, and Elinor Ostrom in the 21st century.

This paper reports on determinants of small firm growth and survival, using fieldwork evidence collected by face-to-face and telephone interviews. It extends the 'basic' size-age model to a 'comprehensive' growth model with two types of additional explanatory variables: firm specific and business environmental. Estimation is by log-linear regression on Chinese cross-section data, with corrections for sample selection bias and heteroskedasticity. Our results from the comprehensive model highlight the importance of location choice and customer orientation for the growth of Chinese private firms.

A dynamic theory of the small firm is expounded, assuming entrepreneurs maximise business value over a finite time horizon. Predicted trajectories for key financial variables are seen to depend on whether debt or equity are cheaper. The predicted trajectories are compared with actual trajectories, using empirical evidence from three years of detailed primary source data on one hundred and fifty new business startups in Scotland. Evidence largely confirms predictions of the model, for the cheap equity case. For this case, as capital and sales rise steadily, debt is retired rapidly, except when interest rates on long-term debt are low. This finding is supported by explicit empirical trajectories of key financial variables.

This paper examines how financial reporting modes are determined within a company, from the perspective of perceived costs and benefits. The modes investigated include financial reporting regimes (e.g. International Financial Reporting Standards, UK Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and the financial reporting techniques which support them (e.g. valuing intangibles and investments, treatment of development costs). A stated preference approach is adopted and applied to a fieldwork analysis of the functioning of a large port authority, which was a member of a group and prepared both consolidated and subsidiary accounts. The analysis is largely qualitative, exploring in-depth such matters as key factors in making choices, the decision-making processes behind choices, and the staging of decisions, but underpinned by a quantitative basis, using a metric for determining net benefits of financial reporting regimes and techniques. Our analysis aims to improve our understanding of a company's choice processes underlying its financial reporting, including its handling of complexity and uncertainty, and its use of innovations in techniques and organisational forms for decision support.

This paper seeks a good measure of new business performance, and then explains this measure by various dimensions of business strategy. Three criteria are used to create a one dimensional ordinal ranking of high, medium and low performance for new business starts: employment growth; return on capital employed; and labour productivity. It is shown that statistical cluster analysis provides a convincing separation of a sample of new business starts into high, medium and low performance categories, using a minimum distance criterion for clustering. An ordinal logit model (with selection) is then used to explain this performance ranking. The results indicate that many widely discussed features of small business strategy have little, or even negative, impact on performance. Of the numerous aims that owner managers may adopt (survival, growth etc.), only one appears to have a major impact on performance; the pursuit of the highest rate of return on investment. Many entrepreneurial perceptions of their own capabilities appear false or unimportant, with the exception of organisational features and systems.

Gavin Reid presents a systematic analysis of what drives investor-investee relations in venture capital markets. In the first analytical work to use a unified framework, he draws upon a modern and general approach to contracting relations, namely principal-agent analysis. This book establishes a clear theoretical framework involving risk management, information handling and the 'trading' of risk and information. Using powerful modern theory as a general and coherent frame of reference to analyse an extensive body of new evidence, the author shows how top investors manage risk and monitor investees, and examines the best relationship between investor and investee. Exploring the principles governing high-risk/high-return investment, this is a unique insight into the turbulent world of the venture capitalist.

The hypothesis that flexibility enhances the long run prospects of the small firm is explored by examining precipitating causes of organizational change within it, and consequential adjustments. The study is fieldwork based and uses evidence gathered directly from entrepreneurs. New measures of flexibility and firm-specific turbulence are used to explain long-run performance, measured over 28 distinct attributes. Econometric estimates (using GLS and Heckman selectivity correction) are reported, on the relationship between flexibility, firm-specific turbulence and performance. Firm-specific turbulence is shown to have a negative effect on performance, but the latter is enhanced by increasing the flexibility of the small firm.