You have a product or service for which the world has been waiting. You've scraped together enough cash to get your idea off the ground. You are confident that your business will succeed. And yet, it is often the case that a short time later you are out of business. Numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that about half of new businesses fail within the first five years. And with those business failures go the life savings and the dreams of the person who started the business. This article describes five finance and accounting pitfalls that should be avoided in order to increase the likelihood that a small business will succeed. Of course, the most common reason for a small business to fail is that customers don't want the product or service. But small businesses are also often killed because of predictable and preventable finance and accounting mistakes: insufficient capital, poor cash management, poor record keeping and controls, improper product pricing, and uncontrolled growth.

This study provides insight into CEO compensation dynamics in the public sector and private sector publicly listed firms in New Zealand. This research uses descriptive statistics, OLS regression, and the difference-in-difference method to analyze the compensation-performance relationship for the period 2005 to 2012. Our findings show that CEOs in the private sector publicly listed firms are receiving higher remuneration benefits. Our results suggest that firm sales and past compensation are the most important determinants of CEO cash-based as well as total compensation. Firms with a larger board size and the presence of a formal remuneration committee are likely to provide higher cash compensation than those without.

The UK fully legalised open market share repurchases in 1981, and to our knowledge no study has investigated the business cycle’s influence on repurchase decision-making. We address this aspect and investigate the period 1985-2014. This is relevant as the business cycle factors impact the firm-specific variables such as cash flow, profitability, dividends and capital structure, and these factors traditionally influence repurchase decisions. This forms the paper’s theoretical intuition, and the empirical objectives test the business cycle’s influence on the decision to undertake a repurchase, and also its influence on repurchases values. The results find that the business cycle influences both the decision of undertaking repurchases and repurchases’ values, and this influence has aggregately remained positively associated with economic prosperity. Thus, the frequency of repurchase announcements by British firms is more probable during prosperous economic circumstances. The results also reveal that the repurchase-business cycle relationship witnessed a structural break in 1996:Q2, and the real difference following this break is the increase in the business cycle’s influence on the decision regarding repurchase values. The paper thus contributes to existing literature by directly testing the UK’s repurchase-business cycle relationship, and providing detailed empirical evidences that business cycle conditions strongly impact the repurchase decision-making.

The diplomatic relations between Azerbaijan and Pakistan have undergone significant development since the late 1990s. Despite some studies focusing on diplomatic and political relations, the economic dimension of this partnership has not been systematically covered. In this paper, a robust least squares (RLS) approach is used to model bilateral trade between the two countries and identify statistically significant determinants, including economic, institutional, and cultural factors, after analyzing the main economic and subsectoral trade dynamics of both countries. The results reveal that Azerbaijan's imports from Pakistan are significantly associated with the country's higher income and market size, while Pakistan's elevated exchange rate and trade costs hinder bilateral trade. In addition, Pakistan's rising manufacturing output increases exports to Azerbaijan but decreases imports from Azerbaijan. Among institutional determinants, government effectiveness, the trade freedom index (TFI), and political stability play significant roles in bilateral trade. Lastly, it was found that cultural proximity increases Pakistani exports to Azerbaijan but not imports from Azerbaijan. The analysis also indicates that domestic savings stimulate Pakistani exports. These findings underscore the complex nature of bilateral trade between Azerbaijan and Pakistan and highlight the need for institutional arrangements to harmonize trade flows and boost welfare gains from trade. The results may be of great importance to intergovernmental working groups, domestic policymakers, and businesses.

Many of Keynes´s ideas and concepts are proven correct in this paper. The demand side, mainly business investments, drives the economy. Business firms steer the business cycle via profit expectations and animal spirits. Injections to and withdrawals from the circular flow of income are multiplied throughout the economy in accordance with Keynes´s multiplier. A sudden and sharp rise in households´ saving rates has a detrimental effect on aggregate demand, in line with Keynes´s paradox of thrift. Finance, not saving in the S=I sense, is the necessary condition for business investments and economic growth to be realized. Keynes´s finance motive thus makes money endogenous, contradicting the textbook result that exogenous money steers aggregate demand, contradicting the mainstream loanable funds theory and putting into question the Keynesian theory of sticky prices as a condition for real growth. However, a crucial omission in Keynes´s productive writings is the lack of an accelerator tying income to investment. Some of his followers such as Paul Samuelson tried to remedy that by developing multiplier-accelerator models. The problem with them is that the accelerator lacks micro foundations, in specific disregarding business confidence. Linking macro accounting identities with empirical national accounts data for five major economies produces the finding that business firms explain more than all aggregate expenditure growth during a 25-year period. Thus, it is concluded that business confidence is the root of the business cycle. Making the accelerator account for business confidence casts new light on the perhaps most well-known Keynesian “truth”: active fiscal policy as a main force stabilizing the business cycle. With business confidence being the endogenous and ubiquitous variable driving the business cycle, it turns out that any exogenous factor has the possibility to affect it. Policy needs to be viewed as a competing factor to the factor(s) driving the cycle in the other, destabilizing direction. The more powerful those factors are (e.g., a deadly virus), the tougher it gets for policy to “win” the competition, turning business confidence around. This leads up to the paper´s main conclusion: the worse the economy, the stronger is the case for active fiscal policy, but the lesser is the chance for it to succeed.