Success and complication rates for ERCP in Austria are comparable to those reported elsewhere. In our study, endoscopists with a case volume exceeding 50 ERCPs per year had higher success and lower overall complication rates.

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Theories of organizational failure predict that reasons for corporate demise may differ by firm age and life cycle stage. However, large-scale empirical studies that investigate the relationship between firm characteristics and specific causes of failure are scarce. This study therefore aims to shed light on firm mortality and firm age by analyzing a unique data set of bankrupt small and medium-sized enterprises. Separate statistical models for individual causes of failure are developed in which the liabilities of age are abstracted and disentangled from liabilities of size and industry specific variables on firm level. In this regard organizational ecology argumentation is integrated with resource-based view reasoning following the call for multi-theoretic approaches in organizational failure research. Results show that different failure causes dominate at specific stages of organizational life as defined by age quartiles. While young and adolescent firms predominantly fail due to internal shortcomings, mature small and medium-sized enterprises struggle more with increased competition and economic slowdowns.

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Family business (FB) scholars often criticize the fact that FB research has not yet developed a commonly accepted definition of what constitutes an FB. At the same time, the literature lacks empirical evidence for this claim. Hence, we collected all empirical FB research articles published between 2002 and 2011 in the five leading FB research journals to examine the types of FB definitions used in the literature and to determine how their usage relates to bibliographical and methodological contextual factors. The resulting 238 articles were analyzed in terms of their underlying approaches to defining FBs. Our paper provides empirical support for the notion that FB research has not yet found a commonly accepted definition of FB. Most definitions can be classified as being rooted in the components-of-involvement approach (44% of all evaluated articles), in the essence approach (21%), or in a combination of the two (33%). We also find that the type of FB definition used in empirical research in our sample is significantly associated with the publication outlet, the continent of data collection, the number of authors and the stock market listing status of analyzed firms.