With an interdisciplinary approach, this book elaborates and discusses the strategic, regulatory and economic scenario that the sponsorship of a European Digital Single Market has been generating for small- and medium-sized companies (SMEs). Encompassing expert innovative analysis of the regulatory framework, economic dynamics and organizational processes, SMEs in the Digital Era highlights the effects these have and the complex process through which SMEs can enter and successfully compete in the digital market. With contributions from international scholars, this insightful book takes a deep dive into the current most relevant debates taking place in management, economics and business law using original evidence from a variety of fields and countries. Chapters offer a fresh look at the new policies and regulatory tools required to meet the challenges of digitalization, reflecting on the effects on employment, competition and organizational processes, and how imbalances can impact the future of the technological revolution. Providing insights into the most advanced and recent research on digital markets, this will be an excellent resource for academics, practitioners, managers and policymakers in fields ranging from organization theory and organizational behaviour to strategy, economic analysis as well as economics and business law.

The Impact of Constitutional Protection of Economic Rights on Entrepreneurship: A Taxonomic Survey highlights how characteristics of the legal infrastructure of a country can create conditions that enhance new business creation. It is an exploration of the institutional determinants of entrepreneurship and the way these can affect the observed cross-country differences in the creation of new firms. The main aim is to analyze 195 constitutions, singling out the provisions that enhance economic freedom and are thus likely to create an institutional and legal setup favorable to new business creation. The study tries to answer a question of primary importance for the analysis of entrepreneurship. Does the constitutional protection of principles and values usually associated with a country’s endowment of entrepreneurship capital and presence of small firms positively influence the rate of new firm formation and the total endowment of entrepreneurship capital in that country? The remainder of this monograph is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses the importance of institutions in shaping the entrepreneurship capital of a country and favoring the emergence of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Section 3 describes how higher-rank formal institutions represented by actual constitutional provisions affect the design of lower rank norms and regulations of primary importance for economic activity. Section 4 outlines the features of ‘economic constitutions’, i.e. of constitutional provisions playing a key role in the management of a country’s economy. Section 5 gives an overview of alternative measures of entrepreneurship and discusses their implications for empirical analysis. Section 6 focuses on the countries that have adopted the principles of ‘economic constitutions’ in their written constitutions and discusses the impact of the de jure and de facto implementation of such principles on entrepreneurship. Section 7 shows how the prevailing psychological traits of a country’s population may shape the impact of constitutional provisions on its proneness to entrepreneurship and sheds light on the relationship between constitutional provisions and the observed cross-country and cross-industry differences in labor productivity. Finally, Section 8 concludes and provides some recommendations for entrepreneurship policy.