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Compares the development and characteristics of three groups of highly successful British senior executives – self‐made entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, and a group of intrapreneurs who are members of the family owning the company for which they work, but not the company′s founder. One important common factor within the first two groups (which distinguishes them from the third group) is the overcoming of adversity in childhood. This seems to set a pattern of behaviour throughout life which contributes to their success by giving them the ability to cope with and learn from different situations and setbacks during their careers. Other factors which discriminate between the groups are the degree of risk taking, innovation and political style. All three groups have much in common. They are all good communicators who work extremely hard and are intrinsically motivated.

The long‐awaited regulations to provide statutory compositional requirements for the ever‐increasing range of meat products have at last arrived; presented in the form of a triology—The Canned Meat Product Regulations, The Meat Pie and Sausage Roll Regulations and The Sausage and Other Meat Product Regulations—all of which apply to England and Wales only; presumably the Scottish counterparts, modified for the geographical variations in commodities, will appear in due course. The Meat Pie and Sausage Roll Regulations come into operation on May 31 1968; the other two on May 31 1969.

This paper investigates the economic impact of corporate name changes around the time of their announcement. We analyse a sample of 107 listed Australian companies that changed their name over the period January 1995 to December 1999. We conduct separate analysis of firms having ‘major’ versus ‘minor’ name changes; of firms with coincident financial restructuring versus firms without restructuring; of small firms versus large firms and of dotcom firms versus non‐dotcom firms. Generally, we find some evidence of a negative association between the corporate name change event and abnormal returns. This seems particularly the case for those companies whose name change is deemed to be ‘major’.

Although it was ordained in the Beginning, we are told, that mankind should have dominion over the fish of the sea, it is only within comparatively recent times that the ocean has provided man with that very substantial proportion of his food supply now deriving from this source. More and still greater weights of fish are taken from the sea each year, but the food requirements of a hungry world are increasing too, at a rate that is a persistent source of alarm to many, so that any design or device that may decrease wastage and thus expand the quantities of food available, must be given careful thought and consideration. The case for utilising aureomycin or some other antibiotic to reduce fish spoilage has a not unreasonable aspect, but at this year's conference of the Public Health Inspectors' Association, Mr. John D. Syme, who is Chief Port Health Inspector at Grimsby, and should therefore know something about the fishing industry, came out fairly strongly against the idea; he feared it might cause a lowering of standards of hygiene on fishing vessels, and although the duration of voyages could be lengthened, he doubted whether in the long run the condition of the fish on landing would show any improvement. He regarded the step proposed as retrograde and contrary to the generally accepted trend of recent years toward the production of purer food and the elimination of preservatives as far as possible.

With the drastically changed pattern of the retail food trade in recent years in which the retailer's role has become little more than that of a provider of shelves for commodities, processed, prepared, packed and weighed by manufacturers, the defence afforded by the provisions of Section 113, Food and Drugs Act, 1955 has really come into its own. Nowadays it is undoubtedly the most commonly pleaded statutory defence. Because this pattern of trade would seem to offer scope for the use of the warranty defence (Sect. 115) in food prosecutions it is a little strange that this defence is not used more often.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how markets in financial instruments directive (MiFID) and regulation national market system (Reg NMS) affect the competition for order flow among trading venues in, respectively, Europe and the USA.

The paper examines the differences between MiFID and Reg NMS and provides, based on market microstructure principles, insights as to their likely impact on European and the US securities markets.

Although MiFID and Reg NMS share the common objective of enhancing competition in securities markets, they adopt different provisions with respect to three issues that strongly influence the competition for order flow among trading venues. Specifically, some of the provisions set forth by the US regulation with respect to the best execution duty, the consolidation of market data and the disclosure of execution quality information appear to be more effective, compared to the European Union ones, in strengthening competition for order flow among trading venues.

Regulatory factors can only partly explain the current structure of the European and US securities markets. Technology and heterogeneity in traders' demand are other important factors that concur in shaping the European and US markets.

The degree of competition for order flow among trading venues depends on how regulations define the best execution duty, the availability of updated and consolidated pre‐trade (i.e. quotations) and post‐trade (i.e. transactions) information and the efficiency of post‐trading infrastructures.

The paper addresses issues not yet investigated and provides valuable insights for financial intermediaries, incumbent and prospective exchanges as to the competition in the securities industry, and to regulators as to the likely impact of the new regulations.

In the period before Britain entered the European Community and again at the Labour Government's referendum, one factor which caused most concern in both those in favour and those against entry, was the possible loss of sovereignty by the Houses of Parliament to a supra‐national body. That there would be some loss was accepted but fears that it would be anything more than minimal were discounted, and not enough to affect the lives of ordinary people. Far‐reaching changes required by some of the EEC food directives and regulations, which even if held in abeyance for the usual transitional period will have to be implemented eventually, must be causing many to have second thoughts on this. If more were needed, the embarassing situation at the recent energy conference, at which Britain, as a major oil producer, demanded a separate seat, but had to submit to the overall authority of the Community, the other members of which, figuratively, do not produce a gallon of oil between them. A shift of power from Whitehall to Brussels may not be so evident at higher levels of government, however, as in secondary legislation; the language of the departments of government.

Using evidence from a programme of interviews with owners of small businesses, the possible problems which can arise for providers of support services when seeking to help potential entrepreneurs in deprived communities are considered. The focus is a co‐operative development initiative whose history is traced from its origins in the early 1980s, when the process aims of co‐operation were arguably as important as commercial success, to its current form with a more avowedly business ethos. The interviews had, as their principal purpose, to discover whether support could be provided and in what way, and what differences existed between assistance for the entrepreneur and the owner‐manager. A discussion of the distinction between entrepreneurs and owner‐managers provides a basis for analysing the firms in the study. Owner‐management rather than entrepreneurship is argued to be the more appropriate frame and support initiatives are discussed mainly in that context. Training, information (particularly from networking) and consultancy advice are considered as the principal ways of helping businesses of this type.

This paper aims to investigate the association between analyst forecast dispersion and investors’ perceived uncertainty toward earnings.

A new measure for investors’ expectations of earnings announcement uncertainty is constructed, using changes in implied volatility of option contracts prior to earnings announcements. Unlike other proxies of uncertainty, this measure isolates the incremental uncertainty regarding the upcoming earnings announcement and is a forward-looking measure.

Using this new proxy, this paper finds a significant negative correlation between analyst forecast dispersion and investors’ uncertainty regarding the upcoming earnings announcements. Further tests show that this negative correlation is driven by analysts’ private information acquisition rather than analysts; uncertainty toward upcoming earnings announcements. Additional cross-sectional tests show that this negative relationship is more pronounced in the subsample with lower earnings quality.

This paper helps to further the understanding of the information content of analyst forecast dispersion, particularly the ways in which they gather and produce private information and their incentives for so doing.

This paper introduces a new market-based and forward-looking proxy of earnings announcement uncertainty that should be useful in future research. This paper also provides original empirical evidence that analysts gather and produce an additional private information to the market when facing noisy signals and that their information reduces investors’ uncertainty toward upcoming earnings announcements.

THE 31st annual meeting of the Library Association passed off very comfortably at Brighton, and if nothing particularly momentous occurred affecting librarianship, everybody enjoyed the various entertainments and the breezy weather. Brighton certainly deserved the title to breeziness which it claims, because it was stormy nearly every night or early morning during the run of the Conference, and members must be congratulated on the lucky manner in which it was found possible to dodge the showers.