Franchise contracts are identified as a hybrid form of economic organization. Motives for the dominance of franchise arrangements are identified by examining the theoretical literature on franchising ...and related literatures on the theory of the firm, firm growth, managerial and employee selection, and brand name capital. Empirical tests are performed on the incidence of franchise contracts across states for three industries in which franchising is prominent and data are readily available. The results suggest that both principal-agent incentives and informational incentives favor the use of franchise arrangements.
Beesley M. E. and Hamilton R. T. (1986) Births and deaths of manufacturing firms in the Scottish regions, Reg. Studies
20, 281-288. Original data is used to investigate the determinants of regional ...variation in the births and deaths of independent businesses in Scottish manufacturing industries. Inter-regional differences are shown to stem mainly from intra-industry variation in fertility and mortality across the regions. These differences appear to be marked and should be borne in mind when job creation through the stimulation of indigenous entrepreneurial activity is the objective of any regional or national policy.
The meaning and reliability of existing estimates of optimal scale in the production of hospital services are suspect because of the failure to adequately deal with the role of admitting physicians. ...This paper develops estimates of hospital size by studying changes in the size distribution of US short-term general hospitals over the period 1971-77. The technique produces size estimates which would be socially optimal only under very strong assumptions, but it has the advantage of accounting for the impacts of factors which typically have been ignored in cost function studies of hospital size. The analysis reveals substantial differences in survival size among geographic regions. A measure of survival size of nonprofit hospitals by state is developed and its determinants are investigated in a multiple regression framework. Survival size is found to be negatively affected by growth in the profit hospital sector and by the entry of health maintenance organizations while population growth, urbanization, and age have positive impacts. The effects of insurance coverage and of direct controls on capacity and prices are equivocal.
