the shadow of death analysing the pre exit productivity of portuguese manufacturing firms the pre exiting productivity profile of mature firms relative to survivors is examined along with an evaluation of how productivity affects the probability of exit along various dimensions an empirical approach based on an unbalanced panel of portuguese manufacturing firms covering a 10 year period is used the findings confirm that market selection forces low productivity firms to exit but there is also evidence that a sizeable portion of low productivity firms do not shut down conversely there is a non negligible fraction of high productivity firms that do actually close consistent with some key theoretical predictions our analysis reveals that exiting firms have a falling productivity level over a number of years prior to exit finally the results from the survival model show that both small firms and ones with low productivity are relatively much more likely to exit the market industry and macro environment are also found to have a non negligible role on the exit of mature firms

cournot oligopoly with information sharing this paper studies the incentives for information sharing among firms in a cournot oligopoly facing a linear uncertain demand and an affine conditional expectation information structure no information sharing is found to be the unique equilibrium in two cases in which the signals with equal precision are assumed indivisible and infinitely divisible however the nonpooling equilibrium converges to the situation where the pooling strategies are adopted as the amount of information increases hence the efficiency is achieved in the competitive equilibrium as the number of the firm become large

the effect of agglomeration economies on firm deaths a comparison of firm and regional based approaches this paper compares the merits of regional and firm based approaches for analysing the effect of agglomeration economies on firm deaths in ireland we aggregate a comprehensive data set on irish fi

dynamic pricing of perishable assets under competition we study dynamic price competition in an oligopolistic market with a mix of substitutable and complementary perishable assets each firm has a fixed initial stock of items and competes in setting prices to sell them over a finite sales horizon customers sequentially arrive at the market make a purchase choice and then leave immediately with some likelihood of no purchase the purchase likelihood depends on the time of purchase product attributes and current prices the demand structure includes time variant linear and multinomial logit demand models as special cases assuming deterministic customer arrival rates we show that any equilibrium strategy has a simple structure involving a finite set of shadow prices measuring capacity externalities that firms exert on each other equilibrium prices can be solved from a one shot price competition game under the current time demand structure taking into account capacity externalities through the time invariant shadow prices the former reflects the transient demand side at every moment and the latter captures the aggregate supply constraints over the sales horizon this simple structure sheds light on dynamic revenue management problems under competition which helps capture the essence of the problems under demand uncertainty we show that the equilibrium solutions from the deterministic game provide precommitted and contingent heuristic policies that are asymptotic equilibria for its stochastic counterpart when demand and supply are sufficiently large this paper was accepted by yossi aviv operations management

new firm startups technology and macroeconomic fluctuations new firm startup activity is examined within a framework pooling a cross section of 117 industries over six time periods between 1976 and 1986 a model is introduced relating startup activity both to elements of the business cycle in particular the macroeconomic growth rate the cost of capital and the unemployment rate and to industry specific characteristics especially the technological conditions underlying the industry the pooled cross section regression results suggest that macroeconomic fluctuations as well as industry specific elements contribute to startup activity while new firm startups respond positively to macroeconomic growth they are promoted by a low cost of capital and high unemployment rate a somewhat surprising result is that new firm startups are not apparently deterred in capital intensive industries and where r d expenditures play an important role the empirical results suggest that new firms may be able to overcome their inherent size and experience disadvantages in such markets through exploiting university research and pursuing innovative activity

aggregation of information in large cournot markets consider a homogeneous product market where firms have private information about an uncertain demand parameter and compete in quantities we examine the convergence properties of bayesian cournot equilibria as the economy is replicated and conclude that large cournot or almost competitive markets do not aggregate information efficiently except possibly when the production technology exhibits constant returns to scale even in a competitive market there is a welfare loss with respect to the first best outcome due to incomplete information in general nevertheless a competitive market is efficient taking as given the decentralized private information structure of the economy endogenous and costly information acquisition is examined and seen to imply that the market outcome always falls short of the first best level with decreasing returns to scale the results are also shown to be robust to the addition of extra rounds of competition which allows firms to use the information revealed by past prices explicit closed form solutions yielding comparative static results are obtained for models characterized by quadratic payoffs and affine information structures

gender differences in firm performance evidence from new ventures in the united states abstract prior studies examining the performance of female and male owned firms have generally reported that female owned firms underperform male owned firms however it is conceivable that the performance measures used by previous studies and or their inability to control for key demographic differences may have contributed to this finding for example few studies use size adjusted performance measures and yet we know that female owned firms tend to be smaller than their male counterparts similarly risk is typically not considered even though evidence suggests that women tend to be more risk averse than men we use a longitudinal five year database of more than 4000 new ventures that began operations in the u s in 2004 to determine whether potential differences in the performances of female and male owned firms disappear when appropriate performance measures are used and important demographic differences are controlled for in the models the performance measures we examine include 4 year closure rates return on assets roa and a risk adjusted measure sharpe ratio univariate test results confirm our expectation based on both liberal and social feminist theory that there is no difference in the performance of female and male owned new ventures provided performance is appropriately measured further these results are supported by our multivariate analyses which control for demographic differences such as industry experience and hours worked our findings should be of interest to researchers financiers advisors and policy makers perhaps more importantly our findings should also ensure that women who are contemplating starting a new venture are not discouraged from doing so by a false belief that new ventures initiated by women are less likely to succeed than those initiated by men

information revelation in auctions with common and private values we explore the incentives to reveal verifiable private information when there are both common and private components to agents valuations and when private information is held in both dimensions when agents observe only one signal they have no incentive to reveal the signal because such a revelation would negate their information advantage however when agents observe multiple signals they may be incentivized to reveal certain signals that could lower their opponents bids and thereby result in a higher profit from other signals this paper shows that there exists an equilibrium with revelation of common value signals in standard auctions which is an efficient equilibrium that maximizes the social welfare and could provide the seller with a higher profit than a situation with no information revelation

explaining the appearance and success of open space referenda many communities in the united states have begun enacting policies to preserve open space often through local voter referenda new jersey sponsors such municipal action through the green acres program by providing funding and low interest loans to towns that choose to increase property taxes and spend the money raised on open space preservation for the purposes of conservation and or recreation this paper endeavors to understand which factors contribute to the appearance and success of these measures although previous literature has examined this issue this is the first study to account for spatial dependence spatial autocorrelation and to explore dynamic issues through survival analysis the traditional two stage model from the literature is extended by incorporating a bayesian spatial probit for the first stage and a maximum likelihood spatial error model in the second stage a cox proportional hazard model is used to examine the timing of referenda appearance spatial dependence is found in the second stage of the analysis indicating that future studies should account for its influence there is no strong evidence for spatial dependence or correlation in the first stage the survival model is found to be a useful complement to the traditional probit analysis of the first stage

information disclosure in auctions an experiment we report experimental results on the importance of information disclosure policy in first price sealed bid auctions interaction takes place in 10 periods according to a random matching protocol and we control the level of information feedback bidders receive after each period when bidders are informed about the losing bids in previous periods prices are higher than the theoretical prediction however when this information is not revealed the bidding becomes more competitive and the bids come close to the theoretical prediction we suggest that a signaling phenomenon may be important for explaining these results 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

strategic information management under leakage in a supply chain the importance of material flow management for a profit maximizing firm has been well articulated in the supply chain literature we demonstrate in our analytical model that a firm must also actively manage information flows within the supply chain which translates to controlling what it knows as well as what its competitors and suppliers know in our model of horizontal competition between an informed and an uninformed firm with a common upstream supplier material and information flows intersect through leakage of demand order information to unintended recipients as a result the informed firm s drive to control information flows within the supply chain can trigger operational losses through material flow distortion these losses can be so severe that the firm may prefer not to acquire information even when it is costless to do so our results underscore the importance of strategic information management actively managing the supply chain s information flows and making trade offs with material flows where appropriate to maximize profits

communication in cournot oligopoly abstract this paper studies communication in a static cournot duopoly model under the assumption that the firms have unverifiable private information about their costs we investigate the conditions under which the firms cannot transmit any information through cheap talk and show that when these conditions are violated it may be possible to construct informative cheap talk equilibria if the firms can communicate through a third party communication can be informative even when informative cheap talk is impossible we exhibit a simple mediated mechanism that ensures informative communication and interim pareto dominates the uninformative equilibrium for the firms

labor market effects of september 11th on arab and muslim residents of the united states we investigated whether the september 11 2001 terrorists attacks had any effect on employment earnings and residential mobility of first and second generation arab and muslim men in the united states we find that september 11th did not significantly affect employment and hours of work of arab and muslim men but was associated with a 9 11 percent decline in their real wage and weekly earnings with some evidence that this decline was temporary the adverse earnings effects were strongly linked to hate crime incidence estimates also suggest that the terrorists attacks reduced intrastate migration of arab and muslim men

intermarriage and the economic assimilation of immigrants this article investigates the assimilation role of intermarriage between immigrants and natives intermarried immigrants earn significantly higher incomes than endogamously married immigrants even after we take account of human capital endowments and endogeneity of intermarriage the premium does not appear to be a reward for unobservable individual characteristics natives who intermarry do not receive this premium nor do immigrants who intermarry into another ethnic group the premium is mainly attributable to a faster speed of assimilation rather than any difference in labor market quality between intermarried and nonintermarried immigrants at the point of arrival

exchange of cost information in oligopoly when do oligopolists gain by sharing their private information about their costs with one another what are the social welfare effects of such information exchange i study these questions by comparing the oligopolists expected profits under a cost sharing agreement with their expected profits in the bayesian equilibrium that would arise without cost sharing i also analyse the firms decisions to form a trade association to share their cost data under conditions of linear demand and cournot behaviour industrywide information exchange is the unique point in the core of the trade association membership game the exchange of cost data increases expected profits and welfare but reduces expected consumer surplus cost sharing increases efficiency by raising the market shares of lower cost firms and reducing the variability of aggregate output consumer surplus is diminished however because the variance of output is reduced and consumer surplus is a convex function of output

the relationship between firm growth size and age estimates for 100 manufacturing industries this study uses a sample of all firms operating in 100 manufacturing industries to examine some aspects of firm dynamics it finds that firm growth the variability of firm growth and the probability that a firm will fail decrease with firm age it also finds that firm growth decreases at a diminishing rate with firm size even after controlling for the exit of slow growing firms from the sample gibrat s law therefore fails although the severity of the failure decreases with firm size copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

the impact of immigration enforcement on the u s farming sector this paper examines the eects of state and local immigration enforcement eorts on the u s farming sector we use variation in enforcement eorts generated by the timing of adoption of 287 g programs by state and county law enforcement agencies allowing local ocers

decomposition of new venture growth into firm age survey period and vintage effects firm data are accumulated on a yearly basis in view of the linear relationship of firm age foundation year survey year the fluctuations of firm data classified by age and period cannot be decomposed into age period and cohort foundation year effects three decomposition methods are briefly reviewed and applied to japanese data on new ventures founded since 1995 regarding sales and employment growth the age effect is the largest with a downward trend and the cohort effect is negligible regarding labour productivity the age effect indicates upward movements and the cohort effect is negligible the reason of the negligible cohort effect is discussed

the value of transparency in multidivisional firms we study internal incentives transparency and firm performance in multidivisional organizations two independent divisions of the same firm design internal incentives and decide whether to publicly disclose their performances in each division a risk neutral principal deals with a risk averse exclusive agent under moral hazard each agent exerts an unverifiable effort that creates a spillover on the effort cost of the other agent we first study the determinants of the optimal principal agent contract with and without performance transparency then we show how effort spillovers affect the equilibrium communication behavior of each division both principals commit to disclose the performance of their agents in equilibrium when efforts are complements while no communication is the only equilibrium outcome when efforts are substitutes

optimal disclosure policy in oligopoly markets this paper examines the private and social optimality of full disclosure of private information in a two period oligopoly model an incumbent firm is privately informed about the market demand and its production cost after operating as a monopolist in the first period and then competes against an entrant in the second period two main results are derived first it is shown that the incumbent is best off by pre committing to disclose both the demand and cost information by disclosing full information the incumbent nullifies its self defeating intertemporal incentives which arise whenever it has private information about the market demand its cost efficiency or both in addition the equilibrium output variance is the largest under full disclosure which benefits the incumbent ex ante second the paper shows that the incumbent s full disclosure of the demand and cost information may or may not be desirable from a social efficiency standpoint in particular the correlation between the firms production costs is crucial to the rank of disclosure policies in terms of their impact on social efficiency

falling through the cracks grade retention and school dropout among children of likely unauthorized immigrants abstract we evaluate how intensified interior immigration enforcement impacts the likelihood that children of unauthorized immigrants will repeat a grade or drop out of school using a weighted index of the intensity of interior immigration enforcement at the msa level we find that increased enforcement has the largest impact on younger children ages 6 to 13 the estimates which account for the non random residential location of children and their families reveal that increased enforcement raises young children s probability of repeating a grade by 6 percent and their likelihood of dropping out of school by 25 2 percent

recent advances in oligopoly theory from a game theory perspective abstract this paper surveys the contribution that recent developments in game theory have made to the understanding of oligopoly theory it is argued that conventional models suffer from the problem that there are a number of solution concepts offered with little guidance as to which should be selected and this is related to the static nature of the models employed one important development in game theory has been the analysis of repeated games and when applied to oligopoly theory this suggests that outcomes may be more cooperative than conventional theory suggests related to this is the requirement that firms employ credible threats to punish cheating from cooperative outcomes and the paper examines the extent to which imperfect information may restrict the scope of firms to employ such punishments one way in which firms may seek to make threats credible is through strategic investments for example in production capacity and the paper explores how competition over price or output is integrated with competition over instruments for strategic investment

a comparison of optimal tariffs and welfare under no lobbying domestic lobbying and domestic foreign lobbying whether and what type of the lobbying induced trade policies can improve the domestic welfare we show that as compared to the case of no lobbying and the case of domestic lobbying the domestic foreign lobbying may achieve the lowest tariff and may also realise the highest welfare for the domestic country our finding provides a theoretical explanation to the prevalent lobbying competition between asian firms and us firms in usa recently we argue that the domestic foreign lobbying may contribute to a freer trade in the domestic country and lobbying competition may be one of the strongest forces pushing for trade liberalisation

information sharing and tacit collusion in laboratory duopoly markets i introduction economists have long believed that enhanced information about demand conditions or rival actions can play an important role in facilitating collusion for example because it simplifies detection of chiselers stigler 1964 an extensive theoretical literature examines the incentives for non cooperative firms to share information through a trade association about some uncertain parameter see sakai 1990 1991 for a survey firms in these models may cooperate by sharing information in the trade association even though most authors assume that the firms choose non cooperative strategies in the product market under these conditions vives 1984 shows that with demand uncertainty substitute goods and quantity competition each firm s dominant strategy is to conceal information from its rivals therefore under these conditions non cooperative firms will not find it in their interests to form an information sharing arrangement such as a trade association because non cooperative firms should not wish to share information clarke 1983 392 concludes that information pooling mechanisms like trade associations can be considered prima facie evidence that firms are illegally cooperating to restrict output however kirby 1988 shows that non cooperative firms will want to share information if cost functions are sufficiently quadratic moreover hviid 1989 demonstrates that non cooperative firms will prefer to share information if they are sufficiently risk averse these models typically assume that firms interact once and identify the static subgame perfect nash equilibrium ne of the two stage information sharing game this is sensible when the goal is to focus on a narrow set of non cooperative equilibria because the set of non cooperative equilibria becomes very large in these models in the more complex repeated game however repeated interaction between competing firms seems more relevant for empirical applications especially for providing policy insight for trade associations that permit long term interactions among firms unfortunately empirical work in this area based on field data is challenging because the information different decision makers possess and the corresponding residual uncertainty they face are typically difficult to identify this paper uses a different empirical approach we use a series of laboratory duopoly markets to examine the impact of demand uncertainty on sellers output choices specifically we examine the importance of information sharing in facilitating tacit collusion under conditions of demand uncertainty 1 our experiment employs repeated interaction between fixed pairs of subjects trading the ability to directly test the static models for a more realistic policy relevant study of outcomes in the repeated game 2 our results indicate the extent to which results from static theory carry over to the repeated environment and can help guide future theory for dynamic oligopoly models of information sharing the experiment includes four distinct treatment conditions in the primary treatment sellers face uncertain demand but can eliminate uncertainty through voluntary mutual information sharing three control treatments identify the reasons for voluntary information sharing and determine if it leads to more collusive outcomes the first two control treatments eliminate sellers information sharing opportunities in the first control treatment sellers always remain uncertain about demand when choosing output while in the second control treatment sellers always have perfect demand information we refer to these control treatments respectively as forced no sharing and forced sharing throughout the paper the third control treatment sharply reduces collusion incentives by truncating demand while still allowing voluntary information transmission we refer to this control treatment as the truncated demand treatment the results briefly stated are as follows

the death of firms exploring the effects of environment and birth cohort on firm survival in sweden this paper investigates the death of firms and seizes a long term perspective it investigates the life spans of nearly 2 200 firms in seven birth cohorts of swedish joint stock companies founded during seven separate years between 1899 and 1950 research has traditionally emphasized individual and micro oriented factors in explaining post entry performance or has often focused on the influence of firm specific structural factors firm age and size a less attended field recognizes environmental forces this paper focuses on the interaction between the micro and macro levels and combines structural and environmental factors employing a cohort approach it relates firm survival to firm age and size as well as to the effect of cohort affiliation and environmental change over time period effects during macroeconomic expansion the risk of death decreases cohort effects are also evident firms founded during times of economic crisis exhibit lower survival rates consequently cohort affiliation and environmental forces i e period effects can explain differences in death rates in different firm populations

immigration restrictions as active labor market policy evidence from the mexican bracero exclusion an important class of active labor market policy has received little rigorous impact evaluation immigration barriers intended to improve the terms of employment for domestic workers by deliberately shrinking the workforce recent advances in the theory of endogenous technical change suggest that such policies could have limited or even perverse labor market effects but empirical tests are scarce we study a natural experiment that excluded almost half a million mexican bracero seasonal agricultural workers from the united states with the stated goal of raising wages and employment for domestic farm workers we build a simple model to clarify how the labor market effects of bracero exclusion depend on assumptions about production technology and test it by collecting novel archival data on the bracero program that allow us to measure state level exposure to exclusion for the first time we cannot reject the hypothesis that bracero exclusion had no effect on u s agricultural wages or employment and find that important mechanisms for this result include both adoption of less labor intensive technologies and shifts in crop mix

redefining business success distinguishing between closure and failure new firms are believed to have high closure rates and these closures are believed to be failures but two u s census bureau data sources illustrate that these assumptions may not be justified the business information tracking series bits showed that about half of new employer firms survive beyond four years and the characteristics of business owners cbo showed that about a third of closed businesses were successful at closure the cbo also made it possible to compare results of models of business survival and business success but because of non response bias logit models were used similar to previous studies firms having more resources that were larger with better financing and having employees were found to have better chances of survival factors that were characteristic of closure such as having no start up capital and having a relatively young owner were also common in businesses considered successful at closure hence few defining factors can be isolated leading to true failures the significant proportion of businesses that closed while successful calls into question the use of business closure as a meaningful measure of business outcome it appears that many owners may have executed a planned exit strategy closed a business without excess debt sold a viable business or retired from the work force it is also worth noting that such inborn factors as race and gender played negligible roles in determining survivability and success at closure

new firm survival new results using a hazard function a limitation of audretsch s 1991 study of new firm survival was the level of aggregation to industries this precluded linking establishment specific characteristics such as organizational structure and size to post entry performance the purpose of this paper is to relate the post entry performance of individual establishments not only to their technological and market structure environments but also to establishment specific characteristics we do this by estimating a hazard duration function for more than 12 000 individual establishments in u s manufacturing started in 1976 by tracking their subsequent performance over a ten year period we conclude that establishment specific characteristics which audretsch was not able to capture in his earlier study play an important role in shaping the exposure to risk confronting new establishments copyright 1995 by mit press

duopoly information equilibrium cournot and bertrand abstract in a duopoly model where firms have private information about an uncertain linear demand it is shown that if the goods are substitutes not to share information is a dominant strategy for each firm in bertrand cournot competition if the goods are complements the result is reversed furthermore the following welfare results are obtained 1 i with substitutes in cournot competition the market outcome is never optimal with respect to information sharing but it may be optimal in bertrand competition if the products are good substitutes with complements the market outcome is always optimal 2 ii bertrand competition is more efficient than cournot competition 3 iii the private value of information to the firms is always positive but the social value of information is positive in cournot and negative in bertrand competition

establishment exits in germany the role of size and age using comprehensive data for west germany this paper investigates the determinants of establishment exit we find that between 1975 and 2006 the average exit rate has risen considerably in order to test various liabilities of establishment survival identified in the literature we analyzed the impact of establishment size and put a special focus on differences between young and mature establishments our empirical analysis shows that the mortality risk falls with establishment size which confirms the liability of smallness the probability of exit is substantially higher for young establishments which are not more than 5 years old thus confirming the liability of newness there also exists a liability of aging since exit rates first decline over time reaching a minimum at ages 15 18 and then rise again somewhat the determinants of exit differ substantially between young and mature establishments suggesting that young establishments are more vulnerable in a number of ways

an experimental investigation of the impact of information on competitive decision making managers often employ market response models as decision aids and historical information of competitors market outcomes to aid their competitive decisions in oligopolistic settings however little is known about how access to a decision aid or the availability of competitors market outcomes impact a firm s competitive decisions e g prices or market outcomes resulting from those decisions e g profits or how managers make these decisions across such informational conditions hence the objective of this paper is twofold first we investigate whether access to a decision aid and historical information of competitors outcomes yields more or less competitive decisions and outcomes second we determine which learning constructs such as choice reinforcement and beliefs about projected profits best explain competitive actions across various information conditions we find that relative to the availability of competitive information access to a decision aid has a larger effect on lowering prices and profits we also find that in two firm markets price competition is even more intense than in five firm markets similarly the availability of market share information leads to more aggressive pricing even when profits are held constant finally we outline the implications of our findings in making managerial resource allocations to market research endeavors

post entry behaviour and the cycle evidence from germany abstract based on a rich database on establishments in western germany the paper aims at characterising the relationship between on the one hand growth and exit of entering cohorts and on the other hand aggregate business fluctuations a main finding is that exit is not responsive to the cycle which is at odds with views of recessions as times of cleansing where creative destruction processes occur the growth of survivors also displays little cyclical sensitivity but tends to become more responsive to aggregate business fluctuations as the cohort ages two possible explanations for this role of age on the cyclical sensitivity of surviving units are offered in the final section of the paper the first draws on the product specialisation of young and more established plants the second on the role of irreversible investment and industry selection

effects of the minimum wage on employment dynamics the voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment we argue that the minimum wage will impact employment over time through changes in growth rather than an immediate drop in relative employment levels we show that commonly used specifications in this literature especially those that include state specific time trends will not accurately capture these effects using three separate state panels of administrative employment data we find that the minimum wage reduces job growth over a period of several years this finding is supported using several empirical specifications

competitive pricing in markets with different overhead costs concealment or leakage of cost information this paper experimentally investigates how leaders and followers in a duopoly set prices for two product markets that have different overhead costs in a fully crossed two by two design we manipulate the participants private cost report quality as either low or high representing the extent to which these reports reveal that product markets have different overhead costs we show that when only the leader is given a high quality cost report private cost information of higher quality is better incorporated into market prices that are observable to participants both the leader and follower improve in profits and their prices better reflect the differences in overhead costs because the follower infers information from the leader s prices information leakage in contrast when only the follower receives a high quality cost report the leader s profits and prices do not improve this occurs because the follower conceals cost information when the leader has a low quality cost report

cartel enforcement with uncertainty about costs what cartel agreements are possible when firms have private information about production costs in order for a cartel agreement to work it must take into account the incentives for firms to misrepresent their cost information and it must provide sufficient reward so that no firm wishes to defect for private cost uncertainty we characterize the set of cartel agreements with side payments that can be supported as bayesian nash equilibria we show that if defection results in either cournot or bertrand competition the incentive problems in large cartels are severe enough to prevent the cartel from achieving the monopoly outcome in contrast with common cost uncertainty the incentive problems become less severe in large cartels allowing perfect collusion

the exchange rate and company failure in a macro micro model of the uk company sector a macro micro model is presented which is used to predict company failure it bridges the gap between previous macroeconomic models and the microeconomic approach to company failure in the finance literature it can trace the probable effects of exogenous macroeconomic shocks upon the finances and the viability of individual members of the company sector a series of simulation exercises using this model quantifies the impact of variations in the exchange rate upon the failure rate among the top one hundred u k companies this impact is shown to be substantial asymmetric and at times nonlinear copyright 1991 by royal economic society

the effect of naturalization on wage growth a panel study of young male immigrants for young male immigrants naturalization facilitates assimilation into the u s labor market following naturalization immigrants gain access to public sector white collar and union jobs and wage growth accelerates consistent with removal of employment barriers the faster wage growth of immigrants who naturalize might alternatively result from greater human capital investment prior to naturalization stemming from a long term commitment to u s labor markets but there is no evidence that wage growth accelerates or the distribution of jobs improves until citizenship is attained finally the gains from naturalization are greater for immigrants from less developed countries and persist when we control for unobserved productivity

duopolists don t wish to share information abstract this paper shows that in a full bayes cournot equilibrium duopolists would prefer to keep their market information private rather than share it with their opponent this is in contrast to a fulfilled expectations bayes cournot equilibrium where firms are indifferent to sharing

reply on comment to small firms and the merger mania research on performance differences between small and large firms is booming it emerges relatively separated from the mainstream industrial organization literature inspired by levy s comment on an earlier paper we try to bridge the gap between the two areas especially we screen non cooperative game theoretical models for predictions on performance differences most of them forecast higher profits for larger firms but there exist also some models which predict the opposite for very specific circumstances

the life history of cohorts of exits from german manufacturing an investigation of the life history of three cohorts of exits based on longitudinal data covering the population of all manufacturing firms in a german federal state reveals three empirical regularities 1 although the probability of exit tends to decline with age ceteris paribus only about a quarter of all exits is from the group of young firms aged five years or less 2 only a minor fraction of exits lived through a period of continous decline of employment for five years or more before closing down 3 the impact effect of job loss due to exits can differ sharply from the long run effect

do immigrant outflows lead to native inflows an empirical analysis of the migratory responses to us state immigration legislation i estimate the impact on internal migration for 52 different demographic groups of the recent influx of state omnibus immigration laws targeting undocumented immigrants in the united states i find evidence that while the demographic groups pinpointed as having higher percentages of undocumented immigrants certainly experience population and employment outflows from states implementing these immigration laws there is a lack of associated inflows for those demographic groups identified by economic theory as being probable substitutes for undocumented immigrants several segments designated as probable substitutes actually experience an adverse effect on population and employment this finding provides rigorous empirical backing to existing anecdotal evidence of the same cross state migratory phenomenon resulting in clear policy implications in relation to the ongoing debate over immigration

human capital and interethnic marriage decisions common explanations for the generally negative relationship between education and ethnic endogamy include 1 education makes immigrants and their children better able to adapt to native culture thereby eliminating the need for a same ethnicity spouse and 2 education raises the likelihood of leaving ethnic enclaves thereby decreasing the probability of meeting potential same ethnicity spouses this paper considers a third option the role of assortative matching on education if education distributions differ by ethnicity then spouse searchers may trade similarities in ethnicity for similarities in education when choosing spouses u s census data on second generation immigrants provide strong support for the assortative matching mechanism

lingering illness or sudden death pre exit employment developments in german establishments using a large administrative data set for germany this article compares employment developments in exiting and surviving establishments applying a matching approach we find a clear shadow of death effect reflecting lingering illness in both west and east germany establishments shrink dramatically already several years before closure employment growth rates differ strongly between exiting and surviving establishments and this difference becomes stronger as exit approaches moreover we provide first evidence that prior to exit the workforce becomes on average more skilled more female and older in exiting compared to surviving establishments these effects are more clearly visible in west than in east germany

technological competition uncertainty and oligopoly abstract in an oligopoly context the present technological choice of a firm which expects to receive private revelant information just prior to the uncertain market stage has both a flexibility value and a strategic commitment value in contrast to some common wisdom ideas we provide a natural two stage competition framework in which an increase in uncertainty always raises the commitment value of the technological choice of the firm and may decrease its flexibility value when the increased uncertainty takes the form of more variable beliefs the first result tends to reinforce therefore the findings of the strategic commitment literature under certainty

the post entry performance of new small firms in german manufacturing industries while recent years have witnessed a growing interest in research on market entry by new firms evidence regarding their postentry performance is scarce this paper uses longitudinal data for small firms that entered german manufacturing industries between 1979 and 1982 and monitors their performance until 1990 entrants face a high risk of failure hazard rates tend to increase during the first years and to decrease afterwards decline of employment in a cohort due to exits and shrinking firms is compensated by growing survivors no clear cut nexus between start up size and probability of survival shows up copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

immigration enforcement and economic resources of children with likely unauthorized parents abstract over the past two decades immigration enforcement has grown exponentially in the united states using data from the 2005 through 2011 american community survey we exploit the geographical and temporal variation in a novel index of the intensity of immigration enforcement to show how the average yearly increase in interior immigration enforcement over that period raised the likelihood of living in poverty of households with u s born children by 4 the effect is robust to a number of identification tests accounting for the potential endogeneity of enforcement policies and residential location of immigrants and is primarily driven by police based immigration enforcement measures adopted at the local level such as 287 g agreements

the impact of information sharing opportunities on market outcomes an experimental study information regarding uncertain demand conditions or industry costs as well as the opportunity to share this information can have an important impact on firm behavior a series of recent game theoretic models have characterized the incentives for firms to share information regarding uncertain parameters 3 7 8 13 14 16 22 26 20 21 provide a comprehensive survey most of the models assume that behavior in the output market is noncooperative regardless of the firms information sharing decisions this paper reports a series of 15 laboratory sessions that test the noncooperative backward induction approach of these models the results suggest that pricing behavior may be influenced by the information sharing decision under most conditions the noncooperative nash model accurately describes average behavior although in certain conditions information sharing appears to facilitate tacit collusion the paper also estimates a simple behavioral model of learning that describes how experimental subjects learn the optimal information sharing decision as an alternative to the theories backward induction assumption the information sharing models tested here have been interpreted as identifying the incentives for competitive firms to form a trade association that reduces their uncertainty thousands of trade and professional associations are active worldwide and the majority collect information from their members that is aggregated and distributed through association statistical programs the theoretical models demonstrate how three variables influence the information sharing incentives 1 the type of competition bertrand or cournot 2 the nature of the goods substitutes or complements and 3 the source of uncertainty demand or cost the first two variables determine the slope of the firms reaction functions and the uncertainty source along with the information sharing decision determines the degree of correlation among the firms strategies the incentive for noncooperative firms to share information shifts as these three variables change because reduced correlation has a negative or positive effect on profit depending upon the slope of the reaction functions

revisiting the minimum wage employment debate throwing out the baby with the bathwater we revisit the minimum wage employment debate which is as old as the department of labor in particular we assess new studies claiming that the standard panel data approach used in much of the new minimum wage research is flawed because it fails to account for spatial heterogeneity these new studies use research designs intended to control for this heterogeneity and conclude that minimum wages in the united states have not reduced employment we explore the ability of these research designs to isolate reliable identifying information and test the untested assumptions in this new research about the construction of better control groups our evidence points to serious problems with these research designs we conclude that the evidence still shows that minimum wages pose a tradeoff of higher wages for some against job losses for others and that policymakers need to bear this tradeoff in mind when making decisions about increasing the minimum wage

the survival of new plants start up conditions and post entry evolution abstract this paper examines the longevity of entrants we find size to be an important determinant of the chances of survival this being particularly relevant to de novo entrants as compared with entry by established firms current size is also found to be a better predictor of failure than initial size moreover our findings indicate that after controlling for size differences past growth matters for survival suggesting a partial adjustment process for firm size in the post entry period finally new plants are more likely to live longer if they enter growing industries or industries with little entry activity

a stackelberg model of pricing of complementary goods under information asymmetry abstract we consider a duopoly market where two separate firms offer complementary goods in a leader follower type move each firm has private forecast information about the uncertain market demand and decides whether to share it with the other firm we show that information sharing would benefit the leader firm but hurt the follower firm as well as the total system if the follower firm shares information unconditionally we then devise a simple to implement information sharing scheme under which both firms and the total system are better off we also provide several interesting managerial insights and establish the robustness of the model in managing a supply chain through our analytical and simulation results

is immigration enforcement shaping immigrant marriage patterns abstract this paper identifies intermarriage between non citizens and citizens as an important response mechanism to intensified immigration enforcement particularly among mexican non citizens exploiting the temporal and geographic variation in the implementation of interior immigration enforcement from 2005 to 2017 we find that a one standard deviation increase in enforcement raises mexican non citizens likelihood of marrying a u s citizen by 3 to 7 both police based and employment based enforcement contribute to this impact the analysis adds to a growing literature examining how immigrants respond to tightened enforcement and importantly sheds light on the recent growth of intermarriage among mexican immigrants

small business failure and external risk factors unlike much of the previous literature which has generally focused on internal risk factors this study seeks to explore the impact of macro economic factors on small business mortality the results suggest that economic factors appear to be associated with between 30 and 50 of small business failures depending on the definition of failure used as expected failure rates were positively associated with interest rates where failure was defined as bankruptcy and the rate of unemployment where failure was defined as discontinuance of ownership however somewhat unexpectedly failure rates were found to be positively associated with lagged employment rates where failure was defined as to prevent further losses and with current and lagged retail sales where failure was defined as either failed to make a go of it discontinuance of ownership or discontinuance of business this indicates that a strengthening economy may provide the trigger for an increase in voluntary business exits as individual proprietors seek to maximize the returns available to them on both their financial and human capital

manufacturer s revenue sharing contract and retail competition this paper investigates a revenue sharing contract for coordinating a supply chain comprising one manufacturer and two competing retailers the manufacturer as a stackelberg leader offers a revenue sharing contract to two competing retailers who face stochastic demand before the selling season under the offered contract terms the competing retailers are to determine the quantities to be ordered from the manufacturer prior to the season and the retail price at which to sell the items during the season the process of pricing and ordering is expected to result in an equilibrium as in the bayesian nash game on the basis of anticipated responses and actions of the retailers the manufacturer designs the revenue sharing contract adopting the classic newsvendor problem model framework and using numerical methods the study finds that the provision of revenue sharing in the contract can obtain better performance than a price only contract however the benefits earned under the revenue sharing contract by different supply chain partners differ because of the impact of demand variability and price sensitivity factors the paper also analyses the impact of demand variability on decisions about optimal retail price order quantity and profit sharing between the manufacturer and the retailers lastly it investigates how the competition between retailers factor influences the decision making of supply chain members in response to uncertain demand and profit variability