Based on a wide array of data collected by the author, this book uses clear theoretically motivated economic analysis to explain the structure, performance, and influence of universal banks and securities markets on firms during industrialisation. The German universal banks played a significant but not overwhelming role in the ownership and control of corporate firms. Banks gained access to boards via a confluence of their underwriting and brokerage activities, the legal phenomena of bearer shares and deposited voting rights, and the flourishing securities markets of the turn of the twentieth century. In general, bank relationships had little impact on firm performance; stock market listings, or ownership structure, were more important. The findings show that securities markets can thrive within a civil-law, universal-bank system and suggest that financial system complexity can favour rapid industrial expansion.

Finance Capitalism and Germany's Rise to Industrial Power: Upheaval and Recovery

The evolution of co-opetition in the Waipara wine cluster of New Zealand

The article formulates the information theory of firm, introduces the concept of firm as an operating system, which controls the firm’s operation by the means of the information resources processing, in an analogy with the operating system at a microprocessor in the computing devices, represents the director as an information processing element, describes the board of directors as the electronically-scanned electronically-steered phased array radar, considers the scientific problem of strategy creation by the interlocking interconnecting overlapping directors in the boards of directors in the firms in the economic system with the induced nonlinearities. We highlight a fact that the director makes the information sensing, filtering, processing, resonant absorption, analysis, decision making, strategy creation, hence it can be empirically represented as a processing element with the Harvard or von Neumann director’s mindset architectures in line with the digital signal processing science. We think that the board of directors in corporate governance system can be theoretically represented as the electronically-scanned electronically-steered phased array radar with a certain number of electronic devices (directors can be modeled as electronic devices with the active antenna elements, filters banks, digital signal processors, memory chipsets in agreement with the microwave and digital signal processing sciences). We developed the MicroITF operating system and software programs, 1) to control the firm operation by the means of the information resources processing; 2) to accurately characterize the director’s performance by means of a) the filtering of the generated/transmitted/received information by the director into the separate virtual channels, depending on the information content, and b) the measurement of the levels of signals in every virtual channel with the generated/transmitted/received information by the director, in the overlapping interconnecting interlocking directors networks in the boards of directors in the firms during the Quality of Service (QofS) measurements process, and 3) to create the winning virtuous business strategies by the interlocking interconnecting directors in the boards of directors in the firms, using the patented recursive artificial intelligence algorithm.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2587716_code2339102.pdf?abstractid=2587716&mirid=1&type=2

Information theory of firm

Capitals of Capital: A History of International Financial Centres, 1780-2005

The late-Victorian era was characteristed by especially close links between politicians and firms in the UK. Roughly half of all members of Parliament served as company directors, many as directors of multiple firms. We analyze 467 British companies over the period 1895 to 1904 to investigate the interaction of firms and politicians. We find that new-technology firms with politicians serving on their boards were more likely to issue equity finance and had higher Tobin's Q. Our evidence suggests that causality runs from director-politicians to a firm's performance, rather than in the opposite direction.

/pdf/the-economic-benefits-of-political-connections-in-late-53luq6q7v2.pdf

The Economic Benefits of Political Connections in Late Victorian Britain

Pre-World War I Belgium was characterized by a strong concentration of power in the hands of a small elite with ties to business, banks, and politics. We find that political and upper class connections were widespread amongst listed firms, especially connections with the ruling political party. Connected firms had higher growth levels and a higher probability of survival. A shift in political power in 1870 significantly affected the value of connected firms. By 1905, it was bank-affiliated firms active in traditional industries, developed prior to 1870, that had more connections and accrued the largest benefits, which suggest economic entrenchment.

/pdf/business-elites-political-connections-and-economic-1okh8dsyaq.pdf

Business Elites, Political Connections, and Economic Entrenchment: Evidence from Belgium 1858-1909

This paper investigates the effects of cooperation agreements as possible drivers of innovative performance for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) Drawing on the theoretical paradigm of 'open innovation' and on empirical evidence of the existence of a 'threshold to innovate', we analyse whether partnership agreements act as determinants for the SMEs to cross the innovative threshold or to persist in innovation activities Our findings suggest that adopting cooperative strategies is beneficial for companies in order to become and/or remain innovators Distinguishing among size classes, the collaborative advantage seems to be higher for the SMEs: joining forces with other companies, the SMEs can overcome the limits derived from their scarce resources and become active innovators

Partnerships and innovative patterns in small and medium enterprises

Bioelectrical impedance analysis of thermal-induced cutaneous nociception

Industry requires simple, yet efficient tuning methods for controllers. One of these tuning methodologies is the popular Ziegler-Nichols approach that requires little information regarding the process and has some pre-definite tuning rules. Although intensive research has been done in non-integer order controllers and their advantages have been demonstrated, their complexity and tedious tuning kept them away from industrial acceptance. In this manuscript, an existing Ziegler-Nichols method for fractional order controllers is modified to yield optimal parameters. The tuning rules and the optimization algorithm are simple, yet they lead to efficient fractional orders controllers. Simulation results are included to validate the proposed method.

Optimal Fractional Order PID based on a Modified Ziegler-Nichols method

In this work, we present a comparison between three PID-type controllers designed via different methods for a process with time-varying properties. Such a process is commonly encountered in the process industry, with prevalence in the chemical, food and pharmaceutical manufacturing industries. The controllers are varying in complexity from operator level (rule-based) to expert tuning (computer-aided design) and beyond state of art (generalized fractional-order control). Experimental tests indicate the feasibility of the controllers for variations in time constant with varying operation conditions originating from physical changes in the process. This is rather a common problem in practice and highly relevant for control engineering. Furthermore, an analysis of the system properties reveals the opportunity to operate in closed loop in a self-tuning manner, which avoids the necessity to re-design the controller parameter values.

Mihaela Livia Ghita

Papers

Business Elites, Political Connections, and Economic Entrenchment: Evidence from Belgium 1858-1909

Partnerships and innovative patterns in small and medium enterprises

Bioelectrical impedance analysis of thermal-induced cutaneous nociception

Optimal Fractional Order PID based on a Modified Ziegler-Nichols method

A robust self-tuning PID-type control for time-varying process in the pharmaceutical industry