innovation and communication signalling with partial disclosure this paper introduces a model of feedback effect equilibrium i e equilibria in which an asymmetrically informed agent is motivated to communicate its privately known attribute but can do so only through channels or signals which convey directly useful information to competing agents this revelation to the competition serves to reduce the value of the private information held by the first agent models of this kind are of obvious relevance to realistic theories of product or financial market disclosure policies of firms patenting and a host of related behavioural and regulatory issues this model is developed in the context of a set of firms engaged in research and development rivalry in which the value of privately held and disclosed information arises from its implications for the likelihood and timing of productive innovation

two sided uncertainty and up or out contracts a bilateral moral hazard problem provides a rationale for up or out employment contracts the employer sets a wage higher than opportunity cost to induce the worker to invest in firm specific capital if the individual does not make the grade it is in the firm s interest ex post to fire him had the initial arrangement not included provisions for firing individuals the firm would underreport the value of the employee wrecking the incentive scheme the basic model permits both firm and worker to be risk neutral therefore it admits a straightforward multiperiod extension which we also investigate

organizational design and technology choice under intrafirm bargaining comment the authors consider a wide number of applications of an intrafirm bargaining game within organizations where employees and the firm engage in wage negotiations under their presumption that contracts cannot bind employees to the organization the resulting stable wage and profit profiles give rise to an objective function for the firm that places weight on inframarginal profits in an economically significant manner the authors in turn employ this methodology to explore applications of organizational design hiring and capital decisions training and cross training the importance of labor and asset specificity managerial hierarchies preferences for unionization responses to competition and internal capital budgeting copyright 1996 by american economic association

note and comment keynes plus effective demand and changes in firm level r d an empirical note analysing changes over time in firm level r and d efforts we find that demand growth in a firm s sector of principal activity has a positive influence on changes in a firm s r and d effort confirming schmookler s 1969 demand pull hypothesis this finding points to an aspect of effective demand which has never been directly noticed by keynes or the keynesians such findings are important because of evidence in the literature that a firm s innovation activities are positively related to employment growth export intensity and profits

relational contracts and the theory of the firm relational contracts informal agreements sustained by the value of future relationships are prevalent within and between firms we develop repeated game models showing why and how relational contracts within firms vertical integration differ from those between nonintegration we show that integration affects the parties temptations to renege on a given relational contract and hence affects the best relational contract the parties can sustain in this sense the integration decision can be an instrument in the service of the parties relationship our approach also has implications for joint ventures alliances and networks and for the role of management within and between firms

r d support programs in developing countries the turkish experience in this study the determinants of private r d investment are examined at the level of firms in the turkish manufacturing industry we focus our attention on the effect of public r d support programs our findings indicate that public r d support significantly and positively affects private r d investment there seems to be even an acceleration effect on firm financed r d expenditures smaller r d performers benefit more from r d support and perform more r d in addition technology transfer from abroad and domestic r d activity show up as complementary processes given the scarcity of studies on r d support in technologically weaker economies our hope is that the less developed countries can exploit these findings in constructing socially beneficial technology policies

on the design of hierarchies coordination versus specialization we consider an economy that has to decide how assets are to be used agents have ideas but these ideas conflict we suppose that decision making authority is determined by hierarchy each asset ha

the effects of public r d subsidies on firms innovation activities the case of eastern germany this study analyzes the effects of public r d policy schemes on the innovation activities of firms in eastern germany the main question in this context is whether public funds stimulate r d activities or simply crowd out privately financed r d empirically we investigate the average causal effects of all public r d schemes in eastern germany using a nonparametric matching approach compared to the case in which no public financial means are provided it turns out that firms increase their innovation activities by about four percentage points

r d and internal finance a panel study of small firms in high tech industries since joseph schumpeter economists have argued that internal finance should be an important determinant of r d expenditures yet almost without exception previous empirical studies have not found evidence of such a relation using newly available data the authors investigate this puzzle with a panel of 179 small firms in high tech industries under each estimation strategy they employ the authors find an economically large and statistically significant relationship between r d investment and internal finance their results are consistent with the view that because of capital market imperfections the flow of internal finance is the principal determinant of the rate at which small high tech firms acquire technology through r d copyright 1994 by mit press

a theory of trade secrets in firms this article provides a simple theoretical model of trade secrets in hierarchical firms a crucial assumption is that each manager has access to trade secrets pertaining to his own hierarchical level as well as to all lower levels the article explores some implications of this assumption for optimal degree of trade secrets accumulation and protection as well as for the wage structure in firms in addition the model implies that managers may have an incentive to overpay their subordinates and protect their firms trade secrets too much

the existence of self enforcing implicit contracts implicit contracts are nontrivial nash equilibria to the post hiring trading game between a worker and the employer these are supported by intrafirm rather than labor market reputations the existence of an implicit contract that supports efficient trade is proved in a simple model

the firm as a dedicated hierarchy a theory of the origins and growth of firms in the formative stages of their businesses entrepreneurs have to provide incentives for employees to protect rather than steal the source of organizational rents we study how the entrepreneur s response to this problem determines the organization s internal structure growth and its eventual size large steep hierarchies will predominate in physical capital intensive industries and will have seniority based promotion policies by contrast e at hierarchies will prevail in human capital intensive industries and will have up or out promotion systems furthermore e at hierarchies will have more distinctive technologies or cultures than steep hierarchies the model points to some essential differences between organized hierarchies and markets at the root of most enterprises generating economic surplus is an entrepreneur with a unique critical resource such as an idea good customer relationships a new tool or superior management technique a fundamental problem of entrepreneurship is how to enlist the cooperation of the many agents necessary for production without ceding to them too much of the surplus generated by the enterprise the risk of being expropriated however is always inherent in production in particular the entrepreneur has to give her employees whom we call managers close proximity or access to the critical resource for them to learn to produce effectively for example a manager has to understand the idea be in contact with the key customers and suppliers or even learn the entrepreneur s unique managerial techniques in order to work effectively but access also gives the manager the opportunity to expropriate this critical resource and compete against the entrepreneur managers may steal the idea walk away with clients or mimic the entrepreneur s management style and start up a rival concern the greater the access a manager has the more he can appropriate and the more effectively he can compete this paper explores the role of organizational design in

innovation expenditures and the role of government in belgium abstract unlike suggestions from earlier research on the schumpeterian hypothesis it is argued and shown that sales and employment are not simply substitute size measures to test the r d behaviour of foreign and domestic companies operating in belgium further suggests that government sponsored r d has not substituted for privately funded r d foreign companies are found to behave differently and to do less r d the more they pay for externally supplied technology

collateral loan quality and bank risk abstract most commercial loans are made on a secured basis yet little is known about the relationship between collateral and credit risk several theoretical studies find that when borrowers have private information about risk the lowest risk borrowers tend to pledge collateral in contrast conventional wisdom holds that when risk is observable the highest risk borrowers tend to pledge collateral an additional issue is whether secured loans as opposed to secured borrowers tend to be safer or riskier than unsecured loans empirical evidence presented here strongly suggests that collateral is most often associated with riskier borrowers riskier loans and riskier banks

the economics of intrapreneurial innovation abstract we present a model of employee firm interaction in which private intrapreneurial activity competes with the basic activity of the firm the parent firm lacks ownership over any new asset created through intrapreneurial activity but asset complementarity gives it an advantage over outsiders in the auction to develop the asset we show that a firm might tolerate or even encourage intrapreneurial activity if the complementarity is high and the innovation environment is favourable contrary to intuition higher complementarity may lead to lower innovation levels we present some empirical evidence in support of the model s predictions

whom do high growth firms hire we study employment and new hires among high growth firms hgfs in the swedish knowledge intensive sectors 1999 2002 using matched employer employee data we find that hgfs are more likely to emp

a failure inducement model of research and development expenditure abstract empirical evidence for the schumpeterian suggestion of a positive relationship between profitability and innovative effort is slim in fact the opposite is often suggested an alternative failure inducement hypothesis argues that firms make innovative efforts when performance falls below a minimum threshold resulting in a negative relationship between profitability and r d expenditures data on r d expenditures in italian industry in the early 1980s a period of severe economic crisis show that both hypotheses are relevant for firms whose profits are well above or well below average respectively

firm foundations and the role of financing constraints improving the economic conditions for small and medium sized firms as well as start ups is high on the agenda of policy makers in this paper we discuss some policy options for fostering the creation of new enterprises the discussion focuses on measures which aim at helping start ups to overcome liquidity constraints in order to provide the background for this discussion the paper provides some new empirical results on the determinants of firm foundations as well as some stylised facts on the occurence of liquidity constraints in west germany we analyse the regional distribution of start up intensity and offer several hypotheses to explain this distribution to a large extent the regional distribution of start ups can be explained by the existing industry structure regional human capital as well as the regional public traffic infrastructure moreover we show that liquidity constraints occur more often in small and young firms

power in a theory of the firm transactions take place in the firm rather than in the market because the firm offers power to agents who make specific investments past literature emphasizes the allocation of ownership as the primary mechanism by which the firm does this within the contractibility assumptions of this literature we identify a potentially superior mechanism the regulation of access to critical resources access can be better than ownership because i the power agents get from access is more contingent on their making the right investment and ii ownership has adverse effects on the incentive to specialize the theory explains the importance of internal organization and third party ownership

the effects of mission oriented public r d spending on private industry this paper addresses the question of how government mission oriented r d spending affects private r d spending and thereby the total investment in technology the problem is approached within the context of the capital asset pricing model in which the firm views investment projects in terms of their risk and return characteristics the firm is assumed to produce jointly an established product and an r d intensive product where the latter generates an additional output of technology or spillover that is used as an input into the former by investing in r d the firm alters its risk and return characteristics in two ways through the expected profits from the sale of the r d intensive good and through the expected profits from the spillover in this model government mission oriented r d contracting affects the firm by enabling it to separate to some extent these two sources of risk and return the main implication of the analysis is that while some public crowding out of private r d is likely this is almost certain to be incomplete the empirical evidence from the u s transport industry supports the model and suggests that each dollar of government funding adds around 92 cents to total r d spending crowding out private investment by as little as eight percent private companies in the united states perform a great deal of publicly funded r d contract work notably in connection with defence space exploration energy and health this work is generally believed to make two contributions to society a direct effect of providing technology intensive public goods and an indirect or spillover effect into the technology content of the private goods produced by the firms which undertake the government contracts for example space technology has produced heart pacemakers alongside cryogenic insulation materials while automatic instrument landing systems benefit holidaymakers as well as air force pilots

give everyone a prize employee stock options in private venture backed firms this study examines employee stock options in private entrepreneurial companies i focus on private u s venture backed firms because they are renowned for the intensity and organizational depth of their stock option grants contrary to simple stereotype however i show that 27 of u s venture backed firms do not grant stock options to all employees i seek to explain this by theorizing that the economic and legal settings in which venture backed companies exist lead to both costs and benefits from the use of stock options to attract compensate incent monitor and retain certain employees and that sometimes the costs exceed the benefits i test the theory by determining whether variation in the organizational depth to which venture backed firms grant employee stock options can be explained by proxies for these economic and legal costs such proxies include the fraction of employees who are in technical positions the degree of flatness in the firm s organizational structure its proximity to other venture backed companies the number of patents it has been granted and the fraction of equity held by venture investors the results support the theory and thereby imply that venture backed firms grant employee stock options in an economically sophisticated manner

measuring firm size in empirical corporate finance abstract in empirical corporate finance firm size is commonly used as an important fundamental firm characteristic however no research comprehensively assesses the sensitivity of empirical results in corporate finance to different measures of firm size this paper fills this hole by providing empirical evidence for a measurement effect in the size effect in particular we examine the influences of employing different proxies total assets total sales and market capitalization of firm size in 20 prominent areas in empirical corporate finance research we highlight several empirical implications first in most areas of corporate finance the coefficients of firm size measures are robust in sign and statistical significance second the coefficients on regressors other than firm size often change sign and significance when different size measures are used unfortunately this suggests that some previous studies are not robust to different firm size proxies third the goodness of fit measured by r squared also varies with different size measures suggesting that some measures are more relevant than others in different situations fourth different proxies capture different aspects of firm size and thus have different implications therefore the choice of size measures needs both theoretical and empirical justification finally our empirical assessment provides guidance to empirical corporate finance researchers who must use firm size measures in their work

the nature of the firm and peculiarities of the corporation i must thank the independent social research foundation for generous funding of the research on which this paper draws

the private r d investment response to federal design and technical competitions it is the federal government s role to promote investment in research and development rd and 2 contracting with private firms and nonprofit organizations such as universities to perform rd the winning firm recovered its development costs in the form of profits on the sale of the airplanes and the losing firms did not recoup their r d investment mansfield 1971 p 122

the provision of incentives in firms i ncentives are the essence of economics despite many wide ranging claims about their supposed importance there has been little empirical assessment of incentive provision for workers the purpose of this paper is to critically overview existing work on the provision of incentives since the interests of workers and their employers are not always aligned a large theoretical literature has emphasized how firms design compensation contracts to induce employees to operate in the firm s interest this literature has reached into many areas of compensation and has pointed to a multitude of different mechanisms that can be used to induce workers to act in the interests of their employers these include piece rates options discretionary bonuses promotions profit sharing efficiency wages deferred compensation and so on my objective here is to evaluate this literature in the light of a growing empirical literature on compensation where possible i will address the literature from two perspectives first an underlying assumption of this literature is that individuals respond to contracts that reward performance accordingly i consider whether agents behave in this way and whether these responses are always in the firm s interest second i address whether firms write contracts with these responses in mind in other words do contracts look like the predictions of the theory incentives are provided to workers

towards a political theory of the firm abstract the revenues of large companies often rival those of national governments and some companies have annual revenues higher than many national governments among the largest corporations in 2015 some had private security forces that rivaled the best secret services public relations offices that dwarfed a us presidential campaign headquarters more lawyers than the us justice department and enough money to capture through campaign donations lobbying and even explicit bribes a majority of the elected representatives the only powers these large corporations missed were the power to wage war and the legal power of detaining people although their political influence was sufficiently large that many would argue that at least in certain settings large corporations can exercise those powers by proxy yet in economics the commonly prevailing view of the firm ignores all these elements of politics and power we must recognize that large firms have considerable power to influence the rules of the

workers versus firms bargaining over a firm s value we introduce a distinction between a firm and its network of workers in a competitive world if networks are easily lured away the workers must receive the entire value of their contribution to the firm how then can service firms have equity value a model is analysed in which workers are paid less as a group than their value even in a competitive world the workers are assumed to have a nonwage benefit for working at the current firm this benefit is privately known these privately known benefits make it impossible for the workers to agree on a division of their value should they leave the existing firm for a new enterprise the result is that the workers may receive a total compensation that is less than their contribution to the firm

the knowledge production of r and d many studies investigate the relationship between r d expenditures as an input and patents as an intermediate product or output of a knowledge production function we suggest that the productivity of research in patent production functions has been underestimated in the literature as scholars typically use information about r d i e the sum of research expenditure and development expenditure due to data availability however in most industries only applied research will lead to patentable knowledge and development happens after the initial research phase that may have led to a patent instead of using data on r d we separate the knowledge creating process into r and d this data stems from r d surveys of belgian firms it turns out that only the r part of r d expenditure has a significant effect on patents and that development expenditure are insignificant thus previous literature relying on r d expenditure suffers from a measurement error such that the coefficient of r d is biased towards zero as r d includes a large fraction of irrelevant expenditure i e development expenditure with respect to patenting

trust in large organizations several authors suggest that trust is an important determinant of cooperation between strangers in a society and therefore of performance of social institutions we argue that trust should be particularly important for the performance of large organizations in a cross section of countries evidence on government performance participation in civic and professional societies importance of large firms and the performance of social institutions more generally supports this hypothesis moreover trust is lower in countries with dominant hierarchical religions which may have deterred networks of cooperation trust hold up remarkably well on a cross section of countries this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the relationship between federal contract r d and company r d according to recent estimates federal budget outlays for research and development rd this component will rise 28 percent and absorb 70 percent of all federal r d spending in 1984 compared to under 50 percent in 1980 since work corresponding to about one half of the dollar value of the federal r d program is generally performed by private industrial firms under contract with federal agencies the rapid increase in federal r d outlays will presumably be reflected in a similar increase in the value of commitments by industrial firms to perform government r d one of the most important economic questions posed by the large prospective increase in resources allocated to federal contract r d concerns its consequences for the economy s rate of technical progress of productivity growth in the next section i argue that the ultimate impact on productivity depends on how company decisions to finance r d are affected by the availability of federal contract r d funds i then provide a brief review and critique of previous studies of the relationship between companyand federalfinanced r d performed in industry and present new estimates which differ from existing ones with respect to both methodology and implications these estimates are consistent with the hypothesis that increases in federal r d activity tend to be associated with significant reductions in companyfinanced r d a number of studies have attempted to determine the ceteris paribus effects of company and federal r d on the rate of productivity growth p by estimating variants of the equation

does flattening government improve economic performance evidence from china this paper examines a causal relationship between the flattening of a government hierarchy and economic performance by exploiting a panel data set on government reorganization in china from 1995 to 2012 delayering has led to increases in revenue and inter governmental transfers for county governments but the associated enlarged span of control makes it difficult for upper level governments to coordinate and monitor local ones this has led to a reduction in county governments total public expenditure and pro growth expenditure as well as an increase in land corruption overall the flattening of the government hierarchy has a negative effect on economic performance

the evolutionary firm and cournot s dilemma to transform this competence based approach into an evolutionary theory the con nection between the firm and veblen s concept of social knowledge is more fully devel oped once established the evolutionary theory of the firm is utilised to bypass marshall s reconciliation problem and solve cournot s dilemma

workers trust funds and the logic of wage profiles this paper defines a concept a worker s trust fund which is useful in analyzing optimal age earnings profiles the trust fund represents what a worker loses if dismissed from a job for shirking in considering whether to work or shirk a worker weighs the potential loss due to forfeiture of the trust fund if caught shirking against the benefits from reduced effort this concept is used to show that the implicit bonding in upward sloping age earnings profiles is not a perfect substitute for an explicit up front performance bond or employment fee it is also shown that the second best optimal earnings profile in the absence of an up front employment fee pays total compensation in excess of market clearing in a variety of stylized cases

trust firm organization and the pattern of comparative advantage interpersonal trust favors the delegation of decisions and tasks within firms allowing the expansion of more productive units we show that this interaction between trust and firm organization contributes to shaping the pattern of comparative advantage high trust regions and countries exhibit larger value added and export shares in delegation intensive industries relative to other industries consistent with the idea that trust allows firms to expand beyond a narrow circle of family members and friends such effects are driven by an increase in average firm size reflecting in turn a shift of the size distribution away from the smallest firms and toward the small to medium ones according to our estimates trust is no less relevant than human or physical capital or institutions in shaping the pattern of comparative advantage

an analysis of the composition of r d spending research and development encompasses a myriad of activities generally research is the primary search for technical or scientific advancement and development is the translation of such advancement into product of process innovations the national science foundation has fostered an even finer breakdown basic research applied research and development in practice however r d is more heterogeneous than these labels imply the research fields associated with basic research include areas in both the physical and biological sciences applied research and development projects relate to product groups as diverse as all the activities in the industrial sector nevertheless most previous empirical studies of the microeconomic aspects of r d have treated r d spending as a single homogeneous activity consequently a generally acceptable set of variables has developed for explaining inter firm levels of r d spending but virtually nothing is known about the determinants of the inter firm composition of r d

markets for partially contractible knowledge bootstrapping versus bundling discuss how a seller can appropriate rents when selling knowledge that lacks legal property rights by solving either an expropriation or a valuation problem and then analyze how seller rents increase when a portion of the intellectual property ip can be protected the analysis shows that a sequential strategy in which the protected portion of the ip is sold prior to selling the unprotected ip is superior to selling both portions of the ip as a bundle jel d23 l14 o31

federal funding and the level of private expenditure on basic research economists have long been interested in questions concerning the role of government in stimulating private sector innovation in the late 1950s blank and stigler 2 asked in particular whether government funded industrial research and development r d activity was likely to stimulate or substitute for private sector expenditure on r d a number of studies have since addressed this issue and most conclude in favor of the existence of a positive relationship between federal r d expenditures and the level of private r d investment leyden and link 8 have provided a theoretical rationale for this observed complementarity they suggest that federallyfunded industrial r d activity may generate knowledge spillovers and other infratechnology that may raise the productivity of inputs into private r d r d is a heterogeneous activity and a question which has received relatively little attention in the literature is the extent to which the apparent complementarity between federal and private industrial r d spending holds for the different components of firms r d budgets cross section evidence on this issue produced by link 13 suggests that

the firm as a communication network this paper analyzes how organizations can minimize costs of processing and communicating information communication is costly because it takes time for an agent to absorb new information sent by others agents can reduce this time by specializing in the processing of particular types of information when these returns to specialization outweigh costs of communication it is efficient for several agents to collaborate within a firm it is shown that efficient networks involve centralization that individuals delegate tasks to subordinates only if they are overloaded and that the number of transits to the top tends to be equalized across individual information items

globalization and the empowerment of talent globalization has been identified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities and as the emergence of talent as the new stakeholder in the firm this paper examines the role of trade integration for the changing nature of the corporation international trade leads to a war for talent which makes it more likely that an organizational equilibrium emerges in the integrated world economy in which control is delegated to lower levels of the firms hierarchy empowering human capital furthermore trade integration is shown to lead to waves of outsourcing and to convergence in corporate cultures across countries

establishment size and local employment growth in a sample of more than 2000 u s counties smaller average establishment size is generally associated with faster subsequent growth rates of sectoral employment both within and across sectors the estimated effects are large in magnitude and thus economically important and are consistent with several theories previously developed these findings contribute toward a more precise understanding of the role of small businesses in economic growth and labor markets

the boundaries of the firm revisited why do firms exist what is their function and what determines their scope these remain the central questions in the economics of organization they are also central questions for business executives and corporate strategists the worldwide volume of corporate mergers and acquisitions exceeded 1 6 trillion in 1997 it is hard to imagine that so much time effort and investment bankers fees would be spent on adjusting firm boundaries unless there was some underlying economic gain indeed the exceptional levels of merger and acquisition activity over the past two decades are a strong indication that economically significant forces do determine organizational boundaries the study of firm boundaries originated with the famous essay by coase 1937 who raised the question of why we observe so much economic activity inside formal organizations if as economists commonly argue markets are such powerful and effective mechanisms for allocating scarce resources coase s answer was in terms of the costs of transacting in a world of imperfect information when the transaction costs of market exchange are high it may be less costly to coordinate production through a formal organization than through a market in large part thanks to the work of williamson 1975 1985 recent decades have seen a resurgence of interest in coase s fundamental insight that firm boundaries can be explained by efficiency considerations our understanding of firm boundaries has been sharpened by identifying more precisely the nature and sources of transaction costs in different circumstances in the process the focus of

the boundaries of firms as information barriers when contracts are incomplete the property rights theory of firms suggests that ownership of physical assets provides better outside options which in turn strengthen the owner s incentives to invest in the enterprise this approach is less suitable for human capital firms such as management consulting that lack physical assets this article develops an alternative theory for integration that sheds light on the boundaries of human capital firms in particular when a relationship between parties includes large potential externalities reducing the outside option of each party will be beneficial integration provides this reduction by blurring the contribution of individual parties within the firm and thus lowering their independent market valuation unlike some results in the property rights literature the results here are robust to variations in ex post bargaining solution

assessing the effect of public subsidies on firm r d investment a survey this survey examines the empirical literature on the relationship between public r d subsidies and private r d investment over the past five decades the survey reveals a considerable heterogeneity of empirical results that cannot be explained fully by methodological issues we aim to provide further explanations of the possible causes of that heterogeneity in particular we emphasise a set of issues that in our view are critical to understanding the potential effect of public r d subsidies on private r d spending special attention is paid to the dynamic aspects and composition of firm r d the constraints faced by the firm such as financial constraints and the amount and source of public subsidies none of these issues have been investigated in depth we formulate a set of research assumptions to guide future empirical research in this field

who participates in r d subsidy programs the case of spanish manufacturing firms abstract empirical evidence on the effectiveness of r d subsidies to firms has produced mixed results so far one possible explanation is that firms and project selection rules may be quite heterogeneous both across agencies and across industries leading to different outcomes in terms of the induced additional private effort here we focus on the participation stage using a sample of spanish firms we test for differences across agencies and industries our results suggest that firms in the same industry face different hurdles to participate in different agencies programs that participation patterns may reflect a combination of agency goals and that patterns differ across high tech and low tech industries

why are governmental r d and private r d complements it is well known that government r d and private r d have a complementary relationship however no previous study has provided an explanation for why that complementary relationship exists this paper argues that infratechnology is the critical link between governmental and private r d and that the observed complementarity is the result of technical complementarity at the production level between funding infratechnology and knowledge sharing a theoritical framework based on this argument is developed and examined empirically for supporting evidence evidence of technical complementary is found as well as evidence that governmental r d stimulates the sharing of knowledge

the effect of government funding on private industrial research and development a re assessment a number of previous studies have attempted to determine the effect of federal support of research and development r d performed in industry on the rate of private investment in r d by estimating regressions of private r d expenditure on federal industrial r d expenditure controlling for total demand sales and in some cases other variables this paper presents arguments and econometric evidence in support of the hypothesis that due to misspecification of the private r d equation i e failure to distinguish government sales from other sales previous estimates of the effect of federal industrial r d on private r d funding are seriously upwardly biased

the productivity of agricultural credit in india this study examines the nature of the relationship between formal agricultural credit and agricultural gross domestic product gdp in india specifically the role of the former in supporting agricultural growth using state level panel data covering the period 1995 1996 to 2011 2012 the study uses a mediation analysis framework to map the pathways through which institutional credit relates to agricultural gdp relying on a control function approach to tackle the problem of endogeneity the findings from the analysis suggest that over this period all the inputs are highly responsive to an increase in institutional credit to agriculture a 10 increase in credit flow in nominal terms leads to an increase by 1 7 in fertilizers n p k consumption in physical quantities 5 1 increase in the tonnes of pesticides 10 8 increase in tractor purchases overall it seems quite clear that input use is sensitive to credit flow whereas gdp of agriculture is not credit seems therefore to be an enabling input but one whose effectiveness is undermined by low technical efficiency and productivity

absorptive capacity coauthoring behavior and the organization of research in drug discovery we examine the interface between for profit and publicly funded research in pharmaceuticals firms access upstream basic research through investments in absorptive capacity in the form of in house basic research and pro publication internal incentives some firms also maintain extensive connections to the wider scientific community which we measure using data on coauthorship of scientific papers between pharmaceutical company scientists and publicly funded researchers connectedness is significantly correlated with firms internal organization as well as their performance in drug discovery the estimated impact of connectedness on private research productivity implies a substantial return to public investments in basic research

governance of adjustments the article proposes a research program to compare game forms in terms of their ability to govern ex post adjustments to ex ante contracts the comparisons can be based on direct implementation costs or the extent to which desirable adjustments are not implemented in several examples of the program i compare three game forms negotiation over each adjustment ex ante price lists and implicit contracts leaving the stipulation of adjustments to one player if the latter game form is defined as an employment relationship the theory of the firm becomes a special case of the program the article starts with a discussion of the nature and magnitude of adjustment costs followed by an exposition of four examples i then discuss the role of asset ownership review some empirical evidence and look at broader implications

entrepreneurs and new ideas we study how early stage new ideas are turned into successful businesses even promising ideas can be unprofitable if they fail on one dimension such as technical feasibility correspondence to market demand legality or patentability to screen good ideas the entrepreneur needs to hire experts who evaluate the idea along their dimensions of expertise sharing the idea however creates the risk that the expert would steal it yet the idea thief cannot contact any other expert lest he should in turn steal the idea thus stealing leads to incomplete screening and is unattractive if the information of the other expert is critical and highly complementary in such cases the entrepreneur can form a partnership with the experts thus granting them the advantage of accessing each other s information yet very valuable ideas cannot be shared because it is too tempting to steal them

the benefits of lending relationships evidence from small business data this paper empirically examines how ties between a firm and its creditors affect the availability and cost of funds to the firm we analyze data collected in a survey of small firms by the small business administration the primary benefit of building close ties with an institutional creditor is that the availability of financing increases we find smaller effects on the price of credit attempts to widen the circle of relationships by borrowing from multiple lenders increases the price and reduces the availability of credit in sum relationships are valuable and appear to operate more through quantities rather than prices

project characteristics incentives and team production we develop a model to show how agency conflicts free rider effects and monitoring costs interact to affect optimal team size and workers incentive contracts team size increases with project risk decreases with profitability and decreases with monitoring costs as a proportion of output our predictions are consistent with empirical evidence that firm specific risk has increased over time average corporate earnings have declined and firms organizational structures have also flattened the predicted effects of monitoring costs on team size are supported by evidence that improvements in information technology likely to lower monitoring costs lead to larger teams further firms with relatively more intangible assets where monitoring costs are likely to be higher are smaller optimal incentive intensities decrease with risk and increase with profitability the endogenous determination of team size accentuates the positive effects of a decline in risk and an increase in profitability on incentives

bargaining over new ideas the distribution of rents and the stability of innovative firms we develop a theory of the rent distribution and stability of innovative firms our theory is based on a model of bargaining over new ideas the model accounts for the problem of information leakage namely the diffusion of information about new ideas among the agents that participate in the bargaining our main results draw a link between the strength of intellectual property rights enforcement and the distribution of rents in firms as well as between the size and organization of firms and their stability our theory explains why small firms are advantaged in introducing innovation into the market and why spin outs tend to emerge from large established firms jel l1 l2 c7

preservation of trade secrets and multinational wage premia this paper considers the strategic behavior of a multinational rm with superiortechnologyoperatinginadevelopingcountry domestic rmsdonothaveaccesstothesuperior technology other than by hiring away multinational corporation mnc workers the mnc can retain its workers by paying a wage premia and wedetermine how the industry structure and the nature of strategic competitionbetween rms affects the mnc s incentive to pay this premia and thus preserveits informational advantage we characterize conditions under which mncsinef ciently divide job tasks in order to raise the cost to domestic rms ofacquiring the mnc s trade secrets jel f23 j31 o33

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

institutions and concentration abstract in a new dataset of 1 3 million firms from over 100 countries i establish a number of regularities in cross country differences in economic concentration concentration of sales and employment is substantially higher in smaller countries and in less developed countries these two factors alone explain roughly half the cross country variation in concentration nevertheless a number of institutional factors offer additional explanatory power for concentration concentration is higher in countries with higher entry costs for new firms in countries with weaker antitrust policy in countries with less financial development in countries with weaker rule of law and in countries with more burdensome regulation weak institutions are associated with higher concentration especially in industries that do not have naturally high levels of concentration in addition the relationships between institutions and concentration are more pronounced in nontradable and investment intensive industries suggesting that natural barriers to competition facilitate the monopolization of sectors especially when institutions are weak

looking for a theory of the firm future challenges in this paper we present the main developments of the theories of the firm rooted in coase s coase r h 1937 the nature of the firm economica new series 4 386 405 seminal article we show that the two important topics of the nature and boundaries of the firm as well as the internal organization of the firm give place to essential contributions we present those contributions and their limits and then their possible developments finally we introduce the papers of this issue

high tech r d subsidies estimating the effects of sematech abstract sparked by concerns about their shrinking market share 14 leading u s semiconductor producers with the financial assistance of the u s government in the form of 100 million in annual subsidies formed a joint r d consortium sematech in 1987 using compustat data on all u s semiconductor firms we estimate the effects of sematech on members r d spending profitability investment and productivity in so doing we examine two hypotheses the commitment hypothesis that sematech obligates member firms to spend more on high spillover r d and the sharing hypothesis that sematech reduces duplication of member r d spending whereas the commitment hypothesis provides a rationale for the government subsidies the sharing hypothesis does not we find that sematech induced members to cut their overall r d spending on the order of 300 million per year providing support for the sharing hypothesis

estimating the impact of government r d abstract if we do not pay for an input it is important it is suggested that the r d literature by ignoring the fact that government r d is given away has confused zero value of marginal product with zero marginal physical product

asset specificity and a firm s borrowing ability an empirical analysis of manufacturing firms abstract this paper investigates the importance of asset specificity in explaining differences in firms ability to borrow money with empirical research we investigated whether there is a relationship between asset specificity and the debt ratio of a slovene manufacturing firm the basic idea of the research was to link the sources of finance that define property rights and the attributes of the assets that are the objects of finance a firm s capital structure can be viewed as a description of the allocation of risk and control among investors

r d subsidy and self financed r d the case of japanese high technology start ups this paper examines whether public r d subsidies constitute a substitute or complement for private financed r d the empirical analysis is based on a panel data of 223 japanese high technology start ups our evidence is consistent with the complement hypothesis i e that publicly funded r d does promote private r d the complement effects are stronger for more mature firms this is because such firms in the growth phase might have greater demands for r d funds