a model of candidate location with endogenous valence this work gives a theoretical explanation for the increase in campaign spending and party polarization in u s politics i assume that the effectiveness of persuasive advertising and of costly valence campaigning in general positively depends on the share of nonpartisan voters a decline in the number of partisan voters in a constituency results in greater campaign spending by the candidates if the voters are risk averse the candidates who maximize their expected office rents minus the cost of campaigning will choose divergent policy platforms strategically in order to reduce the costs of subsequent campaign spending the degree of policy divergence positively depends on the share of nonpartisan voters for a broad class of voter disutility and candidate cost of valence functions

market imperative and cluster evolution in china evidence from shunde drawing upon the notion of lock in in evolutionary economic geography perspective and concept of market imperative in global production network 2 0 theory this study explores the role of market im

the persistent effects of initial labor market conditions for young adults and their sources unlucky young workers entering the labor market in recessions suffer a range of medium to long term consequences this paper summarizes the findings of the growing empirical literature on this subject and uses it to assess economic models of career development the literature finds large initial effects on earnings labor supply and wages that tend to fade after ten to fifteen years in the labor market and that are accompanied by changes in occupation job mobility and employer characteristics adverse initial labor market entry also has persistent effects on a range of social outcomes including timing and completed fertility marriage and divorce criminal activities attitudes and risky alcohol consumption there is also evidence that early exposure to depressed labor market lowers health and raises mortality in middle age patterns accompanied by a reopening of earnings gaps

towards a capability theory of innovating firms implications for management and policy author s teece dj abstract the author 2017 business enterprises lie at the core of ecosystems that drive economic development and growth in market economies yet until recently mainstream economics has mostly treated firms like homogeneous black boxes run by opportunistic managers the field of strategic management has developed a more nuanced approach to the understanding of how firms are created organized and grow how they innovate and compete and how managers manage one of the leading paradigms in the field is the dynamic capabilities framework in this paper contrasts and complementarities are drawn between dynamic capabilities and economic theories of the firm including transaction cost economics and agency theory connections to the cambridge school are highlighted including the duality between keynes s animal spirits and the dynamic capabilities entrepreneurial owner manager leibenstein s x inefficiency is juxtaposed here with d ineffectiveness knowledge based theories of the firm consistent with cambridge conventions emerge intellectual exchange between strategic management and economics is encouraged to help improve the intuition behind models of firms and the economy

understanding corporate coherence theory and evidence abstract multiproduct firms are perceived to be coherent in their scope yet there is no strong theoretical foundations to explain coherence in modern industrial organization theory this paper shows that as u s manufacturing firms grow more diverse they maintain a constant level of coherence between neighboring activities this finding runs counter to the idea that firms with many activities are generally more incoherent a framework is then presented which appeals to the nature of enterprise learning path dependencies and the nature of the selection environment to explain the ubiquity of coherent diversifiers

experimentation with strategy and the evolution of dynamic capability in the indian pharmaceutical sector this paper demonstrates that radical regulatory changes can be tantamount to technological revolutions by studying indian pharmaceutical firms it shows that radical regulatory changes such as the indian patent act of 1970 the new industrial policy of 1991 and the signing of trips trade related intellectual property rights system in 1995 served to open up new economic opportunities and constraints in the wake of which the winners and losers were selected as a function of the dynamic firm capabilities most appropriate for the new market environment

social and spatial networks in labour markets social connections and referrals are ubiquitous in the labour market both on the job seeker side and on the employer side this article reviews recent developments in the study of referrals highlighting what we have learned regarding the use and impact of referrals on various labour market outcomes and pointing out the increasingly nuanced picture we are gaining on the effects of referrals it then discusses directions for future research emphasizing the importance of using newly available data and combinations of datasets and of making tighter connections with the burgeoning macro labour research that is based on a search and matching framework finally it evaluates the role of referrals from the point of view of policy makers discussing their social welfare implications and ways in which they could be explicitly incorporated into various labour market policies the importance of tighter collaboration between policy makers researchers employers and practitioners is stressed to conduct more rigorous experimentation and evaluation of potential referral based policies and programmes

development of smes and heterogeneity of trajectories the case of biotechnology in france biotechnology is an emergent sector based on the creation of research intensive small and medium enterprises smes while some smes are growing most of them remain small even those set up several years ago what is the pattern of development of the biotech sector what are the patterns of development of firms studies on the development of high tech smes have focused on a business model in which entrepreneurs rely on growth forecasts to persuade capital investors business angels and venture capitalists to invest in a radical innovation project firms aim for a world market to industrialise their innovation and initial public offering ipo enables initial investors to make profits that offset risky initial investment while this model is appealing it is simply one of the possible models of biotechnology development some firms are not designed to experience exponential growth and choose to target local markets moreover not all firms have the ambition of being listed on the stock exchange based on an in depth analysis of the business and development of 60 french biotech smes this article identifies two business models by defining the development trajectories of each of these models it highlights the temporary nature of the emergent model

technological accumulation diversification and organisation in uk companies 1945 1983 a survey of more than 4 000 significant innovations and innovating firms in the uk from 1945 1983 shows that the scope and organisation of technological activities vary greatly as functions of firms principal activities and size 1 technological opportunities and threats are greatest in firms in chemicals and engineering opportunities in such science based and specialist supplier firms in general emerge horizontally in related product markets and downstream in user sectors in scale intensive e g steel vehicles and supplier dominated e g printing construction firms opportunities tend to be upstream in related production technologies breakthrough innovations in science based firms also induce clusters of technological opportunities upstream for suppliers horizontally for partners and downstream for users their effective exploitation requires diversity of firms technological activities greater than that strictly required for current output 2 the nature of technological opportunities and of organisation for their exploitation also varies with firm size firms with fewer than 1 000 employees have major opportunities with specialised strategies in mechanical engineering and instruments the prevalence of broad front technological strategies and of divisionalisation increases sharply with firm size together with dependence on formal r and d activities the size of innovating divisions has diminished sharply over the period divisionalisation improves the goodness of fit between the core business of innovating divisions and the innovations themselves but 40 have remained consistently outside the core business of divisions 3 these findings help identify the key tasks of technological strategy in firms in different industries and of different sizes thus in large firms divisionalisation can create the small size of unit conducive to effective implementation but it cannot absolve central management from the continuous task of matching technological opportunities with organisational forms and boundaries

diversification patterns and survival as firms mature we focus on the relationship between age and diversification patterns of german machine tool manufacturers in the post war era we distinguish between minor diversification adding a new product variation within a familiar submarket and major diversification expanding the product portfolio into new submarkets our analysis reveals four main insights first we observe that firms have lower diversification rates as they grow older and that eventually diversification rates even turn negative for old firms on average where negative diversification corresponds to exit from certain product lines second we find that product portfolios of larger firms tend to be more diversified third with respect to consecutive diversification activities quantile autoregression plots show that firms experiencing diversification in one period are unlikely to repeat this behavior in the following year fourth survival estimations reveal that diversification activities reduce the risk of exit in general and to a varying degree at different ages these results are interpreted using penrosean growth theory

linking economic complexity institutions and income inequality summary a country s mix of products predicts its subsequent pattern of diversification and economic growth but does this product mix also predict income inequality here we combine methods from econometrics network science and economic complexity to show that countries exporting complex products as measured by the economic complexity index have lower levels of income inequality than countries exporting simpler products using multivariate regression analysis we show that economic complexity is a significant and negative predictor of income inequality and that this relationship is robust to controlling for aggregate measures of income institutions export concentration and human capital moreover we introduce a measure that associates a product to a level of income inequality equal to the average gini of the countries exporting that product weighted by the share the product represents in that country s export basket we use this measure together with the network of related products or product space to illustrate how the development of new products is associated with changes in income inequality these findings show that economic complexity captures information about an economy s level of development that is relevant to the ways an economy generates and distributes its income moreover these findings suggest that a country s productive structure may limit its range of income inequality finally we make our results available through an online resource that allows for its users to visualize the structural transformation of over 150 countries and their associated changes in income inequality during 1963 2008

valence politics and equilibrium in spatial election models spatial models of two party or two candidatecompetition almost never have pure strategy nashequilibria when the issue space has more than onedimension this paper shows that the introduction ofvalence issues can create conditions where equilibriaexist even in a multidimensional setting we derivesufficient conditions for the existence of equilibria and characterize the spatial locations of twocompeting parties or candidates when such equilibriaexist the party with the advantage on the valencedimension will generally take a moderate position onthe positional issues we consider the implications ofthese results for public perceptions of the parties incumbency advantages and realigning elections

candidate quality in a downsian model with a continuous policy space abstract this paper characterizes a unique mixed strategy nash equilibrium in a one dimensional downsian model of two candidate elections with a continuous policy space where candidates are office motivated and one candidate enjoys a non policy advantage over the other candidate we show that if voters utility functions are concave and the median voter ideal point is drawn from a unimodal distribution there is a mixed strategy nash equilibrium where the advantaged candidate chooses the ideal point of the expected median voter with probability one and the disadvantaged candidate uses a mixed strategy that is symmetric around it existence conditions require the variance of the distribution to be small enough relative to the size of the advantage

performance effects of added cultural distance in the path of international expansion the case of german multinational enterprises this paper contributes to the debate on the performance impact of added cultural distance in the multinational enterprise s mne s expansion path our research focuses on the ability of mnes to handle complexity associated with added cultural distance in international expansion and on the effect this may have on profitability we hypothesise that firms that make expansion moves involving a high level of added cultural distance per unit of time and those that expand in culturally distant countries in an irregular fashion that is with a higher variability will be less profitable we test these hypothesised relationships using detailed data on 2404 expansion moves undertaken by our panel of 91 german mnes whose expansion paths we tracked during periods ranging between 5 and 20 years

changing cognitive frames changing organizational forms an entrepreneurial theory of organizational development this paper discusses the notion of development in firm organizations on the basis of a comparison with ontogenetic phenomena in nature and offers a behavioral foundation that highlights in particular the impact of bounded rationality cognition and social learning on this basis the paper explores the role of entrepreneurship and its cognitive underpinnings particularly with regard to the nucleus multi person firm i e a newly started entrepreneurial business if the entrepreneurial venture is successful and grows the increasing business volume requires that the firm organization also be expanded its size then sooner or later reaches a stage where the cognitive underpinnings of the firm change qualitatively in a way that forces the firm into major restructuring at this point developmental paths can branch off in quite diverse directions some of which are briefly highlighted copyright 2000 by oxford university press

uncertainty irreversibility and the likelihood of entry an empirical assessment of the option to defer abstract recent work in the real options approach to investment has argued that firms face significant opportunity costs when entry costs are largely irreversible and these costs equal the value of an option to defer investment this study seeks to examine empirically these claims by investigating the interactive effects of uncertainty and irreversibility on the likelihood of entry into new business by diversified firms we investigate both industry and firm specific factors influencing the degree of investment irreversibility in general we find support for the notion that real option value affects the likelihood of entry

clusters entrepreneurial ecosystem co creation and appropriability a conceptual framework extant literature on clusters underplays the role of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial management in creating and co creating organizations markets and supporting ecosystems we employ transaction costs resource knowledge capabilities and power control based theories to provide a comparative static governance based perspective on clusters we embed this into a more general co evolutionary entrepreneurial theory of the emergence evolution and co evolution of markets ecosystems and clusters we suggest that clusters can involve advantages that help engender superior appropriation of co created value as compared to alternatives entrepreneurial managers faced with a degree of choice will help co create clusters and be part of them for as long as they can appropriate more value in this way than through alternatives

cluster versus firm specific factors in the development of dynamic capabilities in the pharmaceutical industry in ireland a study of responses to changes in environmental protection regulations hilliard r and jacobson d cluster versus firm specific factors in the development of dynamic capabilities in the pharmaceutical industry in ireland a study of responses to changes in environmental protection regulations regional studies this paper uses the evolutionary economic theory of the firm to examine the response of pharmaceutical manufacturing firms to changes in environmental regulations quantitative indicators of firms learning and problem solving are developed using data reported to the irish environmental protection agency epa these are used to look at differences in capability between firms that are part of a pharmaceutical agglomeration and firms that are stand alone analysis shows that spatial proximity may be a factor in firms ability to implement both cleaner technology and the mandated managerial processes but that the strength of problem solving routines is also associated with firm specific capabilities hilliard r et jacobson d les facteurs specifiques aux grappes par r

entry into emergent and uncertain product markets the role of associative rhetoric we analyze how firms use media associative rhetoric in their decisions to enter emergent and uncertain product markets in the context of our study this type of rhetoric associates the logics of firms existing markets with the not yet legitimated logics of a newly emerging market our panel study shows that firms enter such markets faster when the associative rhetoric has higher versus lower volume positive versus negative tenor firms versus journalists analysts as the source of information and generalizations versus specific cases as the focus we discuss the implications of our findings for institutional theory and market entry

gibrat s law and diversification this article presents an analysis of the growth patterns of the worldwide top 200 firms in the pharmaceutical industry a test of the gibrat s law of proportionate effect is performed and we find in line with previous literature a violation concerning the variance of growth using disaggregated data on sub markets we are however able to show that this violation can be completely accounted for by a diversification effect namely a scale relation between the number of sub markets in which a firm is active and its size to interpret these findings we propose a stochastic branching model of firm diversification consistent with a notion of cumulative corporate competences

what do firms know what do they produce a new look at the relationship between patenting profiles and patterns of product diversification in this work we analyze the relationship between the patterns of firm diversification if any across product lines and across bodies of innovative knowledge proxied by the patent classes where the firm is present putting it more emphatically we investigate the relationship between what a firm does and what a firm knows using a newly developed dataset matching information on patents and products at the firm level we provide evidence concerning firms technological and product scope their relationships the size scaling and coherence properties of diversification itself our analysis shows that typically firms are much more diversified in terms of products than in terms of technologies with their main products more related to the exploitation of their innovative knowledge the scaling properties show that the number of products and technologies increases log linearly with firm size and the directions of diversification themselves display coherence between neighboring activities also at relatively high degrees of diversification these findings are well in tune with a capability based theory of the firm

the costs of related diversification the impact of the core business on the productivity of related segments i develop the thesis that in related diversified firms the core business in my analysis the largest business may provide benefits such as scope economies to a related segment but it may also exert power and constrain the segment to act in its interests in various internal and external transactions this enables the core business to shift productivity gains toward itself from the segment which could lead to various inefficiencies within the related diversified firm using input output flow data and a multilevel model with the segment as the unit of analysis i first show that a segment s productivity is lower compared with a single business firm when it shares backward and forward complementarity i e when it shares transactions with common suppliers and customers with the core business correspondingly i show that as a mirror image the core business s productivity is enhanced when the business shares backward and forward complementarity with segments and when segments are backward integrated with it i e when the core business provides outputs to segments these shifts in productivity and the attendant inefficiencies do not seem to be destroying the entire value from related diversification overall the findings support the argument that the power and influence exerted by the core business and concomitantly the subsidization of the core business by related segments is an important source of costs borne by segments in a related diversified firm

selective intervention and internal hybrids interpreting and learning from the rise and decline of the oticon spaghetti organization infusing hierarchies with elements of market control has become a much used way of simultaneously increasing entrepreneurialism and motivation in firms however this paper argues that such internal hybrids particularly in their radical forms are inherently hard to successfully design and implement because of a fundamental incentive problem of establishing credible managerial commitments to not intervene in delegated decision making this theme is developed and illustrated using the case of the world leading hearing aids producer oticon in the beginning of the 1990s oticon became famous for its radical internal hybrid the spaghetti organization recent work has interpreted the spaghetti organization as a radical attempt to foster dynamic capabilities by organizational means neglecting however that about a decade later the spaghetti organization has given way to a more traditional matrix organization in contrast an organizational economics interpretation of oticon organizational changes is developed this lens suggests that a strong liability of the spaghetti organization was the above incentive problem frequent managerial meddling with delegated rights led to a severe loss of motivation and arguably caused the change to a more structured organization refutable implications are developed and the discussion is broadened to more general issues of economic organization

the footprint of evolutionary processes of learning and selection upon the statistical properties of industrial dynamics evolutionary theories of economic change identify the processes of idiosyncratic learning by individual firms and of market selection as the two main drivers of the dynamics of industries are such processes able to account for the statistical regularities which industrial structures and dynamics display in this work we address this question by means of a simple multi firm model formalizing the mechanisms of learning and selection as such despite its simplicity the model is able to robustly reproduce an ensemble of empirical stylized facts including ample heterogeneity in productivity distributions persistent market turbulence and fat tailed distribution of growth rates

elections with platform and valence competition abstract we study a game in which candidates first choose platforms and then invest in costly valences e g engage in campaign spending the marginal return to valence depends on platform polarization the closer platforms are the more valence affects the election outcome consequently candidates without policy preferences choose divergent platforms to soften valence competition moreover exogenous increases in incentives for valence accumulation lead to both increased valence and increased polarization the latter because candidates seek to avoid the costs of extra valence as a result the increase in valence is smaller than it would have been with exogenous platforms finally the model highlights the overlooked substantive importance of common modeling assumptions changing the source of uncertainty in our model from noise around the median voter s ideal point to a shock to one candidate s valence as is common in the literature leads to complete platform convergence for all parameter values

the neglect of society in the theory of the firm a systems theory perspective the prevailing theories of the firm acknowledge the importance of trust and loyalty but neglect such behaviour in the substance of their analyses the present paper unravels this paradox by drawing on niklas luhmann s ground breaking insight that the complexity reducing function of social systems leads them to neglect their critical environmental dependencies thereby compromising their own sustainability if the firm is conceived as a social system luhmann s theory implies that the neglect of social behaviour by the predominant theories of the firm can be explained as reflecting the neglect of society by actual firms this argument promises to not only furnish the theory of the firm with a concern for sustainability but also render it more amenable to unconventional institutions such as cooperatives and non profit organisations that help compensate for the damage inflicted by conventional firms on the social environment

a model of candidate location when one candidate has a valence advantage that under some fairly weak assumptions for all levels of the valence advantage the advantaged candidate chooses a more moderate position than the disadvantaged candidate empirical studies of congressional elections by fiorina 1973 and ansolabehere snyder and stewart 2001 support this result d owns 1957 seminal work presents a puzzle for scholars of u s elections why do candidates not converge to the median voter one of the best explanations is that the candidates themselves have ideological preferences as calvert 1985 and wittman 1977 1983 have shown when candidates have such preferences and they are sufficiently uncertain about the preferences of the median voter then they do not converge although they may moderate their positions from their ideal point the basic version of the calvert wittman model however does not account for another basic fact of u s elections often one of the candidates has an advantage due to a nonpolicy factor such as incumbency greater campaign funds better name recognition superior charisma superior intelligence and so on stokes has dubbed such factors valence factors and he has noted their importance in u s elections stokes 1963 1992 1 in this article i extend the basic calvert wittman model by giving one candidate a valence advantage over the other i show that if the valence characteristics of the candidates are approximately equal then when a candidate s valence advantage increases this causes her to move toward the

voters private valuation of candidates quality abstract different voters might have different valuations of candidates qualitative features we argue that this intuitive fact acts as a strong stabilizing force in electoral competition dynamics when candidates are office motivated pure strategy equilibria may exist unlike when all voters favor the same candidate perhaps more importantly it affects candidates platform moderation incentives in a rather intriguing manner when voters are evenly split in terms of their candidates quality valuations then both candidates have incentives to locate sufficiently near but not necessarily exactly at the center of the policy space however as the number of voters who favor the same candidate rises maximum equilibrium differentiation follows a non trivial u shaped pattern it is first decreasing and then increasing in the fraction of voters who prefer the more popular candidate

organizational capabilities and the economic history of the industrial enterprise in my book scale and scope 1990 i focused on the history of the modern industrial firm from the 1880s when such firms first appeared through world war ii i did so by comparing the fortunes of more than 600 enterprises the 200 largest industrial firms at three points in time world war i 1929 and world war ii in each of the three major industrial economies those of the united states britain and germany in this paper i first describe the similarities in the historical beginnings and continuing evolution of these enterprises and then outline my explanation for these similarities next i relate my explanation of these empirical regularities to four major economic theories relating to the firm the neoclassical the principal agent the transaction cost and the evolutionary finally i suggest the value of the transactions cost and evolutionary theories to historians and economists who are attempting to explain the beginnings and growth of modern industrial enterprises

the impact of covid 19 on student experiences and expectations evidence from a survey abstract in order to understand the impact of the covid 19 pandemic on higher education we surveyed approximately 1500 students at one of the largest public institutions in the united states using an instrument designed to recover the causal impact of the pandemic on students current and expected outcomes results show large negative effects across many dimensions due to covid 19 13 of students have delayed graduation 40 have lost a job internship or job offer and 29 expect to earn less at age 35 moreover these effects have been highly heterogeneous one quarter of students increased their study time by more than 4 hours per week due to covid 19 while another quarter decreased their study time by more than 5 hours per week this heterogeneity often followed existing socioeconomic divides lower income students are 55 more likely than their higher income peers to have delayed graduation due to covid 19 finally we show that the economic and health related shocks induced by covid 19 vary systematically by socioeconomic factors and constitute key mediators in explaining the large and heterogeneous effects of the pandemic

the architecture and dynamics of industrial ecosystems diversification and innovative industrial renewal in emilia romagna the paper aims at advancing our understanding of the architecture and diversification dynamics of industrial ecosystems and identifying policies for the innovative industrial renewal of mature economies industrial ecosystems are here defined as multi tiered production systems involving heterogeneous agents operating in sectoral value chains and contributing to the capability domains of the ecosystem and its participants with closely complementary but dissimilar sets of resources and capabilities the geographical boundaries of the industrial ecosystem are shaped by the evolving interdependencies linking organisations within the ecosystem and by the new linkages consolidating beyond that thus the industrial ecosystem is a structured production space centred mainly on its productive organisations as well as other institutions intermediaries and demand side actors purposefully involved in co value creation processes along various types of diversification and innovative industrial renewal trajectories drawing on a five year research programme in the emilia romagna industrial ecosystem a number of case studies are introduced to highlight these trajectories and the underpinning structural learning dynamics the paper concludes by identifying a number of policy implications focusing on strategies for enhancing the structural readiness of the industrial ecosystem and promoting smart diversification and innovative industrial renewal policies jel classifications d20 o25 o30

spatial electoral competition with a probabilistically favored candidate abstract this paper studies unidimensional electoral competition between two office motivated candidates where one of them enjoys a probabilistic and non policy advantage over the other we consider a finite number of voters who have single peaked preferences and whose ideal policies are not known to the candidates unlike the deterministic advantage models we find that the downsian pure strategy equilibrium is in this environment the unique nash equilibrium of the game when the electorate is sufficiently large

on the nature of equilibria in a downsian model with candidate valence abstract i analyze mixed strategy equilibria in a downsian model with two office motivated candidates in which one candidate is endowed with a sufficiently large valence advantage that a voter might prefer this candidate even if the voter strictly prefers the other candidate s policies there is a discrete one dimensional policy space and the preferences of the median voter are uncertain i show that there is a range of moderate policies with no gaps that are optimal for the advantaged candidate there is also a range of liberal policies with no gaps and a corresponding range of conservative policies with no gaps that are optimal actions for the disadvantaged candidate the upper and lower bounds on these ranges of policies vary in predictable ways with the size of the advantaged candidate s advantage

knowledge and competitive advantage the coevolution of firms technology and national institutions this issue of jibs offers reviews of two books that analyse the dynamic interaction between the business environments and business strategies in very different ways the institutional underpinnings for business strategies are a major research topic for comparative management aiming to explain why in different contexts firms pursue different strategies and with different implications for performance j peter murman in knowledge and competitive advantage takes a historical perspective focusing on the co evolutionary processes between national innovation systems business strategies and performance this books thus adds to the industry level longitudinal research reviewed in jibs no 4 2003 tom murtha et al s managing new industry creation and david mckendrick et al s from silicon valley to singapore

business groups and the natural state abstract recent revisionist accounts of corporate governance in both business history and finance are challenging the tradition narrative associated with berle and means 1932 and chandler 1977 in which the american model of diffuse ownership and coherent diversification is both an inevitable outcome of economic development and perhaps a normative standard for the world to follow this essay is an attempt to rethink that narrative in light of the continued significance of the pyramidal business group as a governance structure around the world i argue that business groups arise in response both to inadequacies in arm s length markets and to the needs of what north et al 2009 call the natural state in this view the quality of markets and the demands of the state are tightly interconnected phenomena such a perspective explains the emergence of business groups in developing countries as well as their persistence even in wealthy and sophisticated polities apart from the u s and the u k in the end moreover i endorse the view that the much discussed and oft misunderstood exceptionalism of the u s in corporate governance arises not only from the sophistication of american markets but also importantly from government policies toward corporate taxation and securities regulation policies that arose from the unique public choice problem posed by the differential effect on the u s of the collapse of globalization during the middle years of the twentieth century

towards an economic theory of the multiproduct firm this paper outlines a theory of the multiproduct firm important building blocks include excess capacity and its creation market imperfections and the peculiarities of organizational knowledge including its fungible and taut character a framework is adopted in which profit seeking firms are seen to diversify in order to avoid the high transactions costs associated with using various markets to trade the services of various specialized assets neoclassical explanations of the multiproduct firm are shown to be seriously deficient

diversification ricardian rents and tobin s q according to prevailing theory firms diversify in response to excess capacity of factors that are subject to market failure by probing into the heterogeneity of these factors we develop the corollary that firms that elect to diversify most widely should expect the lowest average rents an empirical test with tobin s q as the measure of rents is consistent with this theory

unlucky cohorts estimating the long term effects of entering the labor market in a recession in large cross sectional data sets this paper studies the differential persistent effects of initial economic conditions for labor market entrants in the united states from 1976 to 2015 by education gender and race using labor for

intangible resources as a key factor in the internationalisation of spanish firms abstract in this paper we analyse the effect of the availability of intangible resources measured by way of tobin s q on the probability of spanish firms increasing their international diversification we find that this impact is positive and statistically significant we also discover that firms with a higher endowment of intangible resources increase their presence in their current markets concentration and that those with a multinational status also expand to new markets scope