an empirical analysis of post merger organizational integration we study post merger organizational integration using linked employer employee data integration is implemented by reassigning a small number of high skilled workers especially in r d and management workforce mixing is concentrated to establishments set up after merger rather than to previously existing establishments worker turnover is high after merger but new hiring yields stable total employment target employees have higher turnover and reassignment particularly if the target firm is small relative to the acquiring firm these findings might suggest that integration is costly but can be achieved by focusing on key employees alternatively the reassignment of a few key employees is sufficient for achieving integration

inheritance law and investment in family firms entrepreneurs may be legally bound to bequeath a minimal stake to noncontrolling heirs the size of this stake can reduce investment in family firms by reducing the future income they can pledge to external financiers using a purpose built indicator of the permissiveness of inheritance law and data for 10 004 firms from 38 countries in 1990 2006 we find that stricter inheritance law is associated with lower investment in family firms but does not affect investment in nonfamily firms moreover as the model predicts inheritance law affects investment only in family firms that experience a succession jel g31 g32

endogenous lifetime and economic growth abstract endogenous mortality is introduced in a two period overlapping generations model probability of surviving from the first period to the next depends upon health capital that is augmented through public investment high mortality societies do not grow fast since shorter lifespans discourage savings development traps are possible productivity differences across nations result in persistent differences in capital output ratios and relatively larger gaps in income and mortality high mortality also reduces returns on education where risks are undiversifiable when human capital drives economic growth countries differing in health capital do not converge to similar living standards threshold effects may also result

inherited corporate control and returns on investment this paper contributes to the literature on management in family firms by investigating how succession in family firms affects returns on investment the identities of the chief executive officer ceo and the chairman of the board cob were used to establish whether the management of the firm can be characterized as founder descendant or external management a unique unbalanced panel data set on listed swedish firms covering the period from 1990 to 2005 was used in the analysis the results show that founder management has a positive effect on the returns on investment in family firms whereas descendant management has a negative impact an external ceo as a successor in family firms leads to more efficient investment policies with increased firm value as a result that is when studying corporate governance in family firms it is important to account for what type of management the firm has further studies are required to understand the relationship between ownership control management and firm performance

ownership consolidation and product characteristics a study of the us daily newspaper market this paper develops a structural model of newspaper markets to analyze the effects of ownership consolidation taking into account not only firms price adjustments but also the adjustments in newspaper characteristics a new dataset on newspaper prices and characteristics is used to estimate the model the paper then simulates the effect of a merger in the minneapolis newspaper market and studies how welfare effects of mergers vary with market characteristics it finds that ignoring adjustments of product characteristics causes substantial differences in estimated effects of mergers jel g32 l13 l82 m37 do mergers affect product characteristics standard merger analyses typically study price effects only and ignore changes in product characteristics this paper endogenizes both it is likely that firms would adjust the features of their products after a merger ignoring this aspect of firm decisions in a merger analysis can lead to a bias in estimated welfare effects specifically i study how ownership consolidation affects product characteristics and welfare in the us daily newspaper market the newspaper market provides an ideal environment for analyzing the effect of mergers on product features for both econometric and economic reasons first of all individual newspapers often circulate in local markets there is substantial variation in demographics and ownership structure across these markets this variation is crucial for this study secondly the characteristics of newspapers are obviously important for welfare for example after an ownership consolidation do newspaper publishers improve or diminish the content quality do they enlarge or shrink the local news ratio do they increase or decrease content variety to address these questions i set up a structural model of the us daily newspaper

do media consumers really dislike advertising an empirical assessment of the role of advertising in print media markets this paper uses data on german consumer magazines observed between 1992 and 2004 to analyze the extent to which consumers dis like advertising we estimate logit demand models separately for the six most important magazine segments in terms of circulation we find little evidence for readers disliking advertising on the contrary we show that readers in many magazine segments appreciate advertising readers of women s magazines business and politics magazines as well as car magazines market segments where advertisements are relatively more informative appreciate advertising while advertising is nuisance to readers of adult magazines a segment where advertisements are particularly uninformative demand for interior design magazines is not well identified our logit demand estimates are confirmed by logit demand models with random coefficients and by magazine specific monopoly demand models

cheap children and the persistence of poverty this paper develops a theory of fertility that offers an explanation for the persistence of poverty within and across countries if educated individuals have a comparative advantage in raising educated children then parental fertility choice is shown to give rise to a poverty trap in which the poor choose high fertility rates with low investment in child quality moreover the impact of child quality choice on economic performance is amplified by the diluting effect of higher fertility on physical capital accumulation the theory proposes insights regarding the effects of inequality globalisation and life expectancy on economic growth and demographic transitions this paper develops a theory of fertility and child educational choice that offers an explanation for the persistence of poverty within and across countries the joint determination of the quality education and quantity of children in a household is studied under the key assumption that individuals productivity as teachers increases with their own human capital in contrast the minimum time cost associated with raising a child regardless of the child s quality the quantity cost is not affected by parental education as a result the price of child quantity relative to the price of child quality increases with individuals wages in particular for low wage individuals for whom the opportunity cost of time is low children of minimal quality are cheap this assumption therefore generates a comparative advantage for the poor in child quantity whereas high wage educated individuals have a comparative advantage in raising quality children consistent with the well known evidence poor households thus choose relatively high fertility rates with relatively low investment in their offspring s education and therefore their offspring are poor as well in contrast high income families choose low fertility rates with high investment in education and therefore high income persists in the dynasty evidence from the us provided by hanushek 1992 suggests that a trade off between quantity and quality of children does indeed exist hanushek argues that movements in family size could explain over half the variance in some test scores and that the elasticity of achievements with respect to the number of children in the family is 0 03 implying that the annual achievement growth of each child in a family will fall about 2 when a second child is added and about 0 5 when a sixth child is added 1

peer pressure and partnerships partnerships and profit sharing are often claimed to motivate workers by giving them a share of the pie but in organizations of any significant size the free rider effects would seem to choke off

management ownership and market valuation an empirical analysis we investigate the relationship between management ownership and market valuation of the firm as measured by tobin s q in a 1980 cross section of 371 fortune 500 firms we find evidence of a significant nonmonotonic relationship tobin s q first increases then declines and finally rises slightly as ownership by the board of directors rises for older firms there is evidence that q is lower when the firm is run by a member of the founding family than when it is run by an officer unrelated to the founder

succession and firm growth results from a non parametric matching approach the article analyses the relationship between succession and firm performance applying a non parametric matching approach on a panel of roughly 4 000 austrian family firms we evaluate the impact of actual past succession as well as planned future successions on employment growth analysing succession plans we do not find a significant difference in employment growth between firms that plan to transfer the firm in the next 10 years and those who do not in contrast past succession exerts a significant and positive employment growth effect which becomes stronger over time

the value of marriage to family firms this paper presents the first empirical evidence showing that the marriage of a member of the controlling family adds value to public corporations the results based on a uniquely comprehensive data set from thailand show that the family firm s stock price increases when the partner is from either a prominent business or a political family abnormal returns tend to be higher for firms whose operation depends on extensive networks in contrast marriages to ordinary citizens are not associated with any abnormal returns these findings are generally supportive of the value of networks in general and marriage in particular

the carnegie conjecture some empirical evidence this paper examines tax return generated data on the labor force behavior of people before and after they receive inheritances the results are consistent with andrew carnegie s century old assertion that large inheritances decrease a person s labor force participation for example a single person who receives an inheritance of about 150 000 is roughly four times more likely to leave the labor force than a person with an inheritance below 25 000 additional albeit weaker evidence suggests that large inheritances depress labor supply even when participation is unaltered warren kendall heir to an insurance company fortune says he s worth about 5 million and has an income of about oh 300 and some thousand a year h e has never held a job or wanted to going down to sea in cruise ships is his full time pursuit he estimates that he has taken about 250 cruises over the past couple of decades spending at least 50 percent to 70 percent of the year afloat morgenthaler 1991 p al

alternative mechanisms for corporate control we examine performance and management characteristics of fortune 500 firms experiencing one of three types of control change internally precipitated management turnover hostile takeover and friendly takeover we find that firms experiencing internally precipitated management turnover perform poorly relative to other firms in their industries but are not concentrated in poorly performing industries in contrast targets of hostile takeovers are concentrated in troubled industries there is also weaker evidence that hostile takeover targets underperform their industry peers we interpret this evidence as consistent with the idea that the board of directors is capable of firing managers whose leadership leads to poor performance relative to industry but that an external challenge in the form of a hostile takeover is often required when the whole industry is in decline the evidence also indicates that firms run by a member of the founding family are less likely to experience either internally precipitated top management turnover or a hostile takeover on the other hand firms whose top management team is dominated by a single relatively young top executive while lacking in internal discipline are more likely to experience a hostile takeover this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

platform competition in two sided markets many if not most markets with network externalities are two sided to succeed platforms in industries such as software portals and media payment systems and the internet must get both sides of the market on board accordingly platforms devote much attention to their business model that is to how they court each side while making money overall this paper builds a model of platform competition with two sided markets it unveils the determinants of price allocation and end user surplus for different governance structures profit maximizing platforms and not for profit joint undertakings and compares the outcomes with those under an integrated monopolist and a ramsey planner jel l5 l82 l86 l96

variations in r d investments of family and nonfamily firms behavioral agency and myopic loss aversion perspectives the behavioral agency model suggests that to preserve socioemotional wealth loss averse family firms usually invest less in r d than nonfamily firms however behavioral agency model predictions a

running in the family parental role models in entrepreneurship it is well established that children of self employed parents are more likely to become self employed themselves but the reasons are still hotly debated using danish register data we investigate the importance and workings of parental role models for the probability of becoming self employed we find that the effect of a self employed father mother is much higher for males females these results are statistically and economically very significant and they survive when we control for parental wealth and work experience from the parents firms and when we exclude cases where the offspring takes over the family business this points to a strong role for parental role models in explaining why self employment runs in the family

task specific human capital since gary becker s 1964 seminal work the theoretical and empirical literature on human capital has focused almost exclusively on general purpose and firm specific human capital in this paper we discuss the implications of a third type of human capital which we call task specific and which we believe is potentially as commonplace and as important as the two classic types by task specific human capital we mean that some of the human capital an individual acquires on the job is specific to the tasks being performed as opposed to being specific to the firm in other words task specific human capital is the simple but plausible idea that much of the human capital accumulated on the job is due to task specific learning by doing the idea of task specific human capital is closely related to occupationand industryspecific human capital in each case human capital is specific to the nature of the work not specific to the firm hence when capital is accumulated multiple firms value the capital so most or even all of the value of the capital will be reflected in the worker s wage the main difference between the idea of task specific human capital and occupationand industryspecific human capital is in how the idea is applied we argue that task specific human capital has much wider applicability than suggested so far by the occupationand industry specific human capital literatures the specific issues we address are cohort effects job design and promotions another argument in the literature closely related to ours is the classic argument of adam smith 1776 in the wealth of nations concerning returns to specialization smith s argument was that due to learning by doing at the level of the task productivity can be enhanced by having each job entail fewer tasks we believe that smith was correct in focusing on learningby doing at the level of the task as an important idea for thinking about organizations the goal of our paper is to describe some of the other implications of this idea for the design and operation of organizations

the evolution of china s one child policy and its effects on family outcomes abstract in 1979 china introduced its unprecedented one child policy under which households exceeding the birth quota were penalized however estimating the effect of this policy on family outco

market provision of broadcasting a welfare analysis this paper presents a theory of the market provision of broadcasting and uses it to address the nature of market failure in the industry advertising levels may be too low or too high depending on the nuisance cost to viewers the substitutability of programs and the expected benefits to advertisers from contacting viewers market provision may allocate too few or too many resources to programming and these resources may be used to produce programs of the wrong type monopoly ownership may produce higher social surplus than competitive ownership and the ability to price programming may reduce social surplus

size doesn t matter diseconomies of scale in the mutual fund industry revisited abstract the academic literature has found mixed evidence that fund size is negatively related to performance one reason for the lack of consensus may be that the fund size and performance relation is endogenous in this paper we identify a set of instrumental variables that influence fund size but are unrelated to expected fund performance using this specification we show that fund size does not appear to affect fund performance

is success hereditary evidence on the performance of spawned ventures a common phenomenon in entrepreneurship is that employees turn away from employment to found their own businesses prior literature discusses the former employers characteristics that influence the creation of entrepreneurial ventures an investigation of whether these characteristics also affect the success of the spawned ventures is missing so far this paper contributes to the literature by showing that entrepreneurial ventures spawned by well performing firms are financially more successful than ventures stemming from poorly performing firms this suggests that spawned entrepreneurs are able to exploit valuable knowledge from their previous employers which impacts their ventures performance positively the analysis is based on a linked employee employer data set for the netherlands for the period 1999 2004

filling or abusing the institutional void ownership and management control of public family businesses in an emerging market despite increased attention given to family firms in the theory of organization and management the value of family governance in emerging markets is not clearly understood we draw insights from agency and institutional economics perspectives to address the debate on whether family governance fills or abuses the void left by weaker market and legal institutions we propose a dual focus on the pattern of family control and weak institutions to reconcile these opposed assessments we analyze how various combinations of family control over ownership strategy and operations yield different benefits and costs for the operational performance of firms in the absence of strong market and legal institutions the uneven development of market institutions across industries and the impact of independent directors reinforce the importance of separating different patterns of family control we find support for our hypotheses when tested on a data set consisting of all publicly listed firms in taiwan between 1996 and 2005 our study contributes to a deeper understanding of family businesses in emerging markets highlights the importance of weak institutions in shaping relative agency costs and illuminates the differential effects of independent directors

mortality reductions educational attainment and fertility choice this paper develops a model where reductions in mortality are the main force behind economic development the model generates a pattern of changes similar to the demographic transition where gains in life expectancy at birth are followed by reductions in fertility and increases in the rate of human capital accumulation the onset of the transition is characterized by a critical level of life expectancy at birth which marks the movement of the economy from a malthusian equilibrium to an equilibrium with investments in human capital and the possibility of long run growth

the social and environmental influences of population growth rate and demographic pressure deserve greater attention in ecological economics abstract ecological economists accept that the global population cannot grow forever but papers discussing the relevance of population growth and the prospects for minimising it are rare in the literature on ecological economics even these papers treat population almost exclusively as an issue relating to the scale of human activity the many ways in which population growth rate and local demographic pressures drive negative social and environmental trends remain largely unarticulated the mistaken belief that action to reduce population growth requires involuntary control of people s reproduction has fostered a taboo on the topic and deterred analysis of demographic influences on issues such as inequality unemployment debt social cohesion and conflict this paper discusses how some of these influences relate to ecological economics discourses on natural resources labour capital and governance it argues that population stabilisation is not only ultimately required for a steady state economy but can be a powerful lever in a virtuous cycle of effects diminishing resource consumption and environmental impacts reversing income inequality and undermining the leverage enjoyed by capital over labour a richer more integrated treatment of population dynamics would greatly enhance the ecological economics research agenda in the coming decades

chicken and egg competition among intermediation service providers we analyze a model of imperfect price competition between intermediation service providers we insist on features that are relevant for informational intermediation via the internet the presence of indirect network externalities the possibility of using the nonexclusive services of several intermediaries and the widespread practice of price discrimination based on users identity and on usage efficient market structures emerge in equilibrium as well as some specific form of inefficient structures intermediaries have incentives to propose non exclusive services as this moderates competition and allows them to exert market power we analyze in detail the pricing and business strategies followed by intermediation services providers copyright 2003 by the rand corporation

identification in differentiated products markets using market level data we present new identification results for nonparametric models of differentiated products markets using only market level observables we specify a nonparametric random utility discrete choice model of demand allowing rich preference heterogeneity product market unobservables and endogenous prices our supply model posits nonparametric cost functions allows latent cost shocks and nests a range of standard oligopoly models we consider identification of demand identification of changes in aggregate consumer welfare identification of marginal costs identification of firms marginal cost functions and discrimination between alternative models of firm conduct we explore two complementary approaches the first demonstrates identification under the same nonparametric instrumental variables conditions required for identification of regression models the second treats demand and supply in a system of nonparametric simultaneous equations leading to constructive proofs exploiting exogenous variation in demand shifters and cost shifters we also derive testable restrictions that provide the first general formalization of bresnahan s 1982 intuition for empirically distinguishing between alternative models of oligopoly competition from a practical perspective our results clarify the types of instrumental variables needed with market level data including tradeoffs between functional form and exclusion restrictions

the market of academic journals evidence from data on french libraries this paper analyzes the demand and cost structure of the french market of academic journals after merging several databases we estimate an aggregated nested logit demand system combined simultaneously with a pricing equation taking into account the evolution of impact factors of journals we identify the structural parameters of this market and find that price elasticities of demand are relatively high indicating that this industry experiences competitive constraints we conjecture that the two sidedness feature of academic journals could be a rationale for our results jel l11 l13 l82 c35

long run effects of public private research joint ventures the case of the danish innovation consortia support scheme subsidized research joint ventures rjvs between public research institutions and industry have become increasingly popular in europe and the us we study the long run effects of such a support scheme that has been maintained by the danish government since 1995 to cope with identification problems we apply nearest neighbor matching and conditional difference in difference estimation methods our main findings are that i program participation effects are instant for annual patent applications and last for three years ii employment effects materialize first after one year and iii there are no statistically significant effects on value added or labor productivity we further show that these overall results are primarily driven by firms that were patent active prior to joining the rjv and that there are no statistically significant effects for large firms the insignificant results we document for large firms coupled with the fact that these type of firms are over represented in many support programs including the one considered here leads us to suggest a rethinking of support policies that often aim at large firms

endogeneity and the dynamics of internal corporate governance abstract we use a well developed dynamic panel generalized method of moments gmm estimator to alleviate endogeneity concerns in two aspects of corporate governance research the effect of board structure on firm performance and the determinants of board structure the estimator incorporates the dynamic nature of internal governance choices to provide valid and powerful instruments that address unobserved heterogeneity and simultaneity we re examine the relation between board structure and performance using the gmm estimator in a panel of 6 000 firms over a period from 1991 to 2003 and find no causal relation between board structure and current firm performance we illustrate why other commonly used estimators that ignore the dynamic relationship between current governance and past firm performance may be biased we discuss where it may be appropriate to consider the dynamic panel gmm estimator in corporate governance research as well as caveats to its use

the effect of sibling sex composition on women s education and earnings this paper documents the impact of siblings on the education of men and women born in the united states between 1920 and 1965 we examine the effect of the number and sex composition of a boy or girl s siblings on that child s educational attainment we find that throughout the century women s educational choices have been systematically affected by the sex composition of her siblings and that men s choices have not women raised only with brothers have received on average significantly more education than women raised with any sisters controlling for household size since sibling sex composition affects women s educational attainment and plausibly may be unrelated to other determinants of earnings it may provide a useful instrument for education in earnings functions for women our results suggest that standard estimates significantly underestimate the return to schooling for women

circulation versus advertiser appeal in the newspaper industry an empirical investigation advertising space is not a homogeneous commodity but something whose value depends on the characteristics of a newspaper s readership it is suggested in particular that the proportion of readers belonging to the more affluent social categories will exert a strong positive influence on advertising this paper investigates the circulation readership profile relation using a simple simultaneous equation framework the model is then estimated across a sample of british and irish daily and sunday newspapers using data collected from industry sources the paper then seeks to quantify the trade off between circulation and the proportion of high income readers copyright 1989 by blackwell publishing ltd

the intergenerational transmission of employers we find that about 40 of a cohort of young canadian men have been employed at some time with an employer for which their father also worked and 6 9 have the same employer in adulthood the intergenerational transmission of employers is positively related to paternal earnings particularly at the very top of the earnings distribution and to the presence of self employment income and the number of employers with which the father has had direct contact it has an important influence on nonlinear patterns in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings

family firm governance strategic conformity and performance institutional vs strategic perspectives a fundamental schism divides the family firm and strategy literatures on the one hand and the institutional literature on the other regarding both the situational prevalence and the utility of conforming behavior the first two schools respectively view strategic differentiation as especially common among family firms and an important source of competitive advantage by contrast the reasoning of institutionalists would suggest that family firms will be subject to unusually powerful motivations to conform in part because of their pursuit of socioemotional wealth objectives unfortunately the relationships between conformity and family firm governance and in fact governance in general have not been amply studied this analysis of fortune 1000 firms finds considerable support for the institutional perspective family involvement is related to greater not lesser conformity in many aspects of strategy although strategic conformity related to superior returns on assets it did not enhance firm market valuations

initial labor market conditions and long term outcomes for economists each year graduate students entering the academic job market worry that they will suffer due to uncontrollable macroeconomic risk given the importance of general human capital and the relative ease of publicly observing productivity in academia one might expect that long term labor market outcomes for students graduating in unfavorable climates will resemble long term outcomes for those graduating in favorable climates in this paper i analyze the relationship between macroeconomic conditions at graduation initial job placement and long term outcomes for ph d economists from seven programs using macroeconomic conditions as an instrument for initial placement i show that a quality and type of initial job have a causal effect on long term job characteristics i also show that better initial placement increases research productivity which helps to limit the set of economic models that can explain the effect of initial placement on long term jobs

estimating market power in a two sided market the case of newspapers the newspaper industry is a two sided market the readers market and the advertising market are closely linked by inter market network externalities we estimate market power in the italian newspaper industry by building a structural model which encompasses a demand estimation

complementarities between employee involvement and financial participation do institutional context differing measures and empirical methods matter the authors investigate whether productivity is greater if firms use employee involvement ei in decision making and financial participation fp as complementary practices based on representative panel data from finnish manufacturing firms the study uses diverse specifications to examine different theoretical explanations of the productivity effects of complementarities the authors find virtually no evidence to support the theory of complementarities when ei and fp are simply measured by their incidence they do find some evidence for complementarities using cross sectional data controlling for several covariates that related work has found to be important for firm performance and also when analyses use measures of the intensity of fp in accounting for differences in empirical findings across varying settings the findings suggest that outcomes depend on the institutional context and are sensitive to variation in measurement and analytical methods

investment policy in family controlled firms abstract we explore the relation between family ownership and corporate investment policy our analysis centers on two incentives risk aversion and extended investment horizons which potentially influence the level and type of investments that family firms undertake we find that family firms devote less capital to long term investments than firms with diffuse ownership structures when dividing long term investment into its two components of r d and capital expenditures we note that family firms relative to nonfamily firms prefer investing in physical assets relative to riskier r d projects additional tests indicate that family firms receive fewer patent citations per dollar of r d investment relative to nonfamily firms overall all empirical results indicate that family preferences for lower firm risk across all family sub types affects corporate r d spending and capital expenditures

explaining international fertility differences why do fertility rates vary so much across countries why are european fertility rates so much lower than american fertility rates to answer these questions we extend the barro becker framework to incorporate the decision to accumulate human capital which determines earnings and health capital which determines life span we find that cross country differences in productivity and taxes go a long way toward explaining the observed differences in fertility and mortality

competition between networks a study of the market for yellow pages this paper estimates the importance of network effects in the market for yellow pages i estimate three simultaneous equations consumer demand for usage of a directory advertiser demand for advertising and a publisher s first order condition derived from profit maximizing behaviour estimation shows that advertisers value consumer usage and that consumers value advertising implying a network effect i find that internalizing network effects would significantly increase surplus as an application i consider whether the market benefits from monopoly which takes advantage of network effects or oligopoly which reduces market power i find that a more competitive market is preferable copyright 2004 wiley blackwell

dynasties in professions and the role of rents and regulation evidence from italian pharmacies abstract this paper provides causal evidence concerning the role of rents in explaining dynasties in professions it focuses on the italian pharmacist labor market and exploits discontinuities established by law in the relationship between the number of pharmacies that should serve a city and the population using a regression discontinuity design it shows that a reduction in rent proxied by the pharmacy to population ratio has a significant and negative impact on the propensity of pharmacists children to follow their parents career in contrast pharmacy rents do not affect the career choices of non pharmacists children who face higher entry barriers i e they do not inherit the family business further evidence shows that rents and lower exposure to competition are associated with stronger family ties also among other professions and within firms

selection on observed and unobserved variables assessing the effectiveness of catholic schools in this paper we measure the effect of catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores because we do not have a good instrumental variable for catholic school attendance we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables we also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bias based on measuring the ratio of selection on unobservables to selection on observables that would be required if one is to attribute the entire effect of catholic school attendance to selection bias we use our methods to estimate the effect of attending a catholic high school on a variety of outcomes our main conclusion is that catholic high schools substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and more tentatively attending college we find little evidence of an effect on test scores

how does the economy shape the financial advisory profession we examine whether economic conditions have a long term impact on the composition of available financial advisors in the profession we find that financial advisors who start their career in recess

time preference and real investment abstract this paper studies the investment timing problem of an entrepreneur with a non tradable real option with undiversifiable risk we find that the time preference can have a significant impact on the risk attitude toward the idiosyncratic risk which results from the wealth effect on the implied option value if the agent is impatient patient an increase in idiosyncratic volatility increases decreases the agent s value and delays hastens investment this finding suggests several important implications and empirical predictions for investment decisions in private firms and public firms with concentrated ownership

price structure in two sided markets evidence from the magazine industry we present and estimate a model of competition in a two sided market the market for magazine readership and advertising using data on magazines in germany we find evidence that magazines have properties of two sided markets the results are consistent with the perception that prices for readers are subsidized and that magazines make all their money from advertisers consistent with advertisers valuing readers more than readers value advertisements our results imply that higher demand on the reader side increases ad rates but that higher demand on the advertising side decreases cover prices

succession financing in family firms business succession is one of the primary management challenges for family firms however many family firms fail at this task because of financial issues although a vast number of studies have investigated the succession process research thus far has failed to determine how and why family firms select particular forms of financing for succession related expenditures accordingly this study conceptually and empirically investigates succession financing we introduce a conceptual framework that investigates the reasons behind an owner manager s intent to use debt for succession financing specifically our model accounts for general and succession related personal factors however we also include a set of firm specific financing behavioral controls in our research the empirical results are derived from a sample of 187 german family firms and the results highlight financial knowledge attitudes succession experience and succession planning as significant determinants of the owner managers debt usage intentions the implications and avenues for future research are discussed

discrimination nepotism and long run wage differentials the wage discrimination model developed by becker has been criticized for predicting that competitive forces will lead to the disappearance of racial discrimination in the long run we have reformulated the model in terms of nepotism toward white workers rather than discrimination against black workers in this new framework both nepotistic and taste neutral firms are expected to survive the competitive struggle in the long run therefore the new framework is consistent with long run as well as short run racial wage differentials

risk tolerance and entrepreneurship a theoretical tradition argues that more risk tolerant individuals are more likely to become entrepreneurs but perform worse we test and confirm these predictions with several risk tolerance proxies using investment data for 400 000 individuals we find that common stock investors are around 50 more likely to subsequently start up a firm firms started up by common stock investors have about 25 lower sales and 15 lower return on assets the results are similar using personal leverage and other risk tolerance proxies we do not find support for alternative explanations such as unobserved wealth or behavioral effects

the mortality cost of political connections we study the relationship between the political connections of chinese firms and workplace fatalities in our preferred specification we find that the worker death rate for connected companies is two to three times that of unconnected firms depending on the sample employed a pattern that holds for within firm estimations the connections mortality relationship is attenuated in provinces where safety regulators promotion is contingent on meeting safety targets in the absence of fatalities connected firms receive fewer reports of major violations for safety compliance whereas in years of fatal accidents the rate of reported violations is identical moreover fatal accidents produce negative returns at connected companies and are associated with the subsequent departure of well connected executives these results provide suggestive evidence that connections enable firms to avoid potentially costly compliance measures rather than using connections to avoid regulatory response after accidents occur our findings emphasize the social costs of political connections and suggest that appropriate regulatory incentives may be useful in mitigating these costs

property rights for the poor effects of land titling secure property rights are considered a key determinant of economic development the evaluation of the causal effects of property rights however is a difficult task as their allocation is typically endogenous to overcome this identification problem we exploit a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles in 1981 squatters occupied a piece of land in a poor suburban area of buenos aires in 1984 a law was passed expropriating the former owners land to entitle the occupants some original owners accepted the government compensation while others disputed the compensation payment in the slow argentine courts these different decisions by the former owners generated an exogenous allocation of property rights across squatters using data from two surveys performed in 2003 and 2007 we find that entitled families substantially increased housing investment reduced household size and enhanced the education of their children relative to the control group these effects however did not take place through improvements in access to credit our results suggest that land titling can be an important tool for poverty reduction albeit not through the shortcut of credit access but through the slow channel of increased physical and human capital investment which should help to reduce poverty in future generations

what drives women out of management the joint role of testosterone and culture abstract exploiting variation across communities in indices correlated with women emancipation we show that in regions where women are less emancipated the average 2d4d digit ratio is lower than that of men compared to regions with higher indices a finding that is consistent with the existence of gender related obstacles into management this finding can explain why a fewer women than men are managers b the proportion of women among managers is higher in countries with higher women emancipation c women managers show more masculine traits once women enter management they are equally able than man

endogenously chosen boards of directors and their monitoring of the ceo author s hermalin benjamin e abstract this paper develops a model in which the effectiveness of a board s monitoring of the ceo depends on the board s independence the independence of new directors is determined through negotiations implicit or explicit between the existing directors and the ceo the ceo s bargaining position and thus influence over the board selection process depends on an updated estimate of the ceo s ability based on prior performance many empirical findings about board structure and performance arise as equilibrium phenomena in this model we also explore the implications of this model for proposed regulations of corporate governance structures please contact the program in law and economics at boalt hall school of law uc berkeley berkeley ca 94720 for a copy of this paper

network effects in the german magazine industry this paper examines the two sided network effects in the german magazine industry we specify and estimate the network effect functions for readers and advertisers nonparametrically and find that they are neither linear nor monotonic

can internal migration foster the convergence in regional fertility rates evidence from 19th century france this paper offers an explanation for the convergence of fertility rates across french departements in the second half of the nineteenth century that emphasises the diffusion of information through internal migration it tests how migration affected fertility by building a decennial bilateral migration matrix between french departements for 1861 1911 the identification strategy uses exogenous variation in transportation costs resulting from the construction of railways the results suggest that the convergence towards low birth rates can be explained by the diffusion of cultural and economic information pertaining to low fertility behaviour by migrants especially by migrants to and from paris

is there a causal effect of concentration on persistent profitability differentials this article searches for a causal effect of industry concentration on estimates of persistent profitability differentials i offer solutions to identification problems that plague related analyses by applying an iv and a natural experiment this is the first study that explains estimates of persistent profit differentials using business segments data allowing to match micro and industry level data more consistently testing linear relations critical concentration levels and interactions with mobility barriers i find no evidence that concentration has any positive effect on long run profitability differences results rather tend to point to a statistically and economically significant negative causal effect

the balance of power in closely held corporations abstract we analyze a closely held corporation characterized by the absence of a resale market for its shares we show that the founder of the firm can optimally choose an ownership structure with several large shareholders to force them to form coalitions to obtain control by grouping member cash flows a coalition internalizes to a larger extent the consequences of its actions and hence takes more efficient actions than would any of its individual members the model has implications for the optimal bundling of cash flow and voting rights and for the optimal number and size of shareholders

children and household economic behavior this paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas for our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure i shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children and i restrict attention largely to western societies excerpt

stewardship or agency a social embeddedness reconciliation of conduct and performance in public family businesses two contradictory perspectives of family business conduct and performance are prominent in the literature the stewardship perspective argues that family business owners and managers will act as farsighted stewards of their companies investing generously in the business to enhance value for all stakeholders by contrast the agency and behavioral agency perspectives maintain that major family owners in catering to family self interest will underinvest in the firm avoid risk and extract resources this paper argues that both these views have application but under different circumstances determined in part by the degree to which the firm and its executive actors are embedded within the family and thus identify with its interests stewardship behavior will be less common and agency behavior will be more common the greater the number of family directors officers generations and votes and the more executives are susceptible to family influence these findings are supported among fortune 1000 firms as well as among the subsample of those firms that are family businesses

population control policies and fertility convergence the rapid population growth in developing countries in the middle of the 20th century led to fears of a population explosion and motivated the inception of what effectively became a global population control program the initiative propelled in its beginnings by intellectual elites in the united states sweden and some developing countries mobilized resources to enact policies aimed at reducing fertility by widening contraception provision and changing family size norms in the following five decades fertility rates fell dramatically with a majority of countries converging to a fertility rate just above two children per woman despite large cross country differences in economic variables such as gdp per capita education levels urbanization and female labour force participation the fast decline in fertility rates in developing economies stands in sharp contrast with the gradual decline experienced earlier by more mature economies in this paper we argue that population control policies are likely to have played a central role in the global decline in fertility rates in recent decades and can explain some patterns of that fertility decline that are not well accounted for by other socioeconomic factors

children and their parents labor supply evidence from exogenous variation in family size although theoretical models of labor supply and the family are well developed there are few credible estimates of key empirical relationships in the work family nexus this study uses a new instrumental variable the sex composition of the first two births in families with at least two children to estimate the effect of additional children on parents labor supply in the united states instrumental variables estimates using the sex mix are substantial but smaller than the corresponding ordinary least squares ols estimates moreover unlike the ols estimates the female labor supply effects estimated using sex mix instruments appear to be absent among more educated women and women with high wage husbands we also find that married women who have a third child reduce their labor supply by as much as women in the full sample while there is no relationship between wives child bearing and husbands labor supply excerpt

an analysis of the stock price reaction to sudden executive deaths implications for the managerial labor market abstract certain characteristics of managerial employment arrangements and of the managerial labor market make shareholder wealth dependent on an executive s continued employment these wealth effects are investigated by examining the common stock price reaction to unexpected deaths of senior corporate executives abnormal stock price changes are documented for a sample of fifty three events these abnormal stock price changes are associated with the executive s status as a corporate founder and with measures of the executive s talents and decision making responsibility and of the transaction costs associated with renegotiating or terminating the employment agreement

managers with and without style evidence using exogenous variation in a large panel of compustat firms we find that firm policy changes after exogenous ceo departures do not display abnormally high levels of variability casting doubt on the presence of idiosyncratic style effects in policy choices after endogenous ceo departures we do detect abnormally large policy changes these changes are larger when the firm is likely to draw from a deeper pool of replacement ceo candidates suggesting the presence of causal style effects that are anticipated by the board our evidence suggests that managerial styles are not transferred across employers and that standard f tests are inappropriate for identifying style effects the author 2013 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oup com oxford university press

a semi parametric analysis of two sided markets an application to the local daily newspapers in the usa summary this paper considers an empirical semiparametric model for two sided markets contrary to existing empirical literature on two sided markets we specify network effects and probability distribution functions of net benefits of the two sides nonparametrically we then estimate the model by nonparametric instrumental variables regression for local daily newspapers from the usa we show that semiparametric specification is supported by the data and the network effects are neither linear nor monotonic with a numerical illustration we demonstrate that the mark up of the newspaper on each side changes drastically with the nonlinearly specified network effects from the case with linear network effects copyright 2015 john wiley sons ltd

population technology and growth from malthusian stagnation to the demographic transition and beyond this paper develops a unied growth model that captures the historical evolution of population technology and output it encompasses theendogenous transitionbetween three regimes that have characterized economic development the economy evolves from amalthusianregime wheretechnologicalprogressis slow andpopulationgrowthprevents anysustainedriseinincomepercapita intoapost malthusianregime wheretechnological progress rises and population growth absorbs only part of output growth ultimately a demographic transition reverses the positive relationship between income and population growth andtheeconomyentersamoderngrowthregimewithreducedpopulationgrowth

should continued family firms face lower taxes than other estates abstract taxes on estates and inheritances may induce heirs to discontinue family firms because firm dissolution incurs transaction costs a preferential tax treatment of transferred family businesses seems to be desirable from a macroeconomic viewpoint the support of dynastic succession however entails also a cost on the economy if firm continuation by less able heirs prevents entry into entrepreneurship here we investigate analytically and quantitatively the trade off between transaction costs saved and creative destruction prevented we find that a unique general equilibrium exists at which depending on the institutional setup low ability heirs either abandon type 1 or continue type 2 a family business a calibration of the model with german data suggests that preferential tax treatment of family firms has severe negative consequences on macroeconomic performance if it causes a threshold crossing from type 1 to type 2 equilibrium it also reveals that the descendants of less able entrepreneurs who were caused by continuation friendly tax policy to keep a family business always lose relative to their status in an economy without such a policy

inside the family firm the role of families in succession decisions and performance this paper uses a unique dataset from denmark to investigate the impact of family characteristics in corporate decision making and the consequences of these decisions on firm performance we focus on the decision to appoint either a family or an external chief executive officer ceo the paper uses variation in ceo succession decisions that result from the gender of a departing ceo s first born child this is a plausible instrumental variable iv as male firstchild firms are more likely to pass on control to a family ceo relative to female first child firms but the gender of a first child is unlikely to affect firms outcomes we find that family successions have a large negative causal impact on firm performance operating profitability on assets falls by at least four percentage points around ceo transitions our iv estimates are significantly larger than those obtained using ordinary least squares furthermore we show that family ceo underperformance is particularly large for firms in high growth industries and for relatively large firms overall the empirical results demonstrate that professional non family ceos provide extremely valuable services to the organizations they head

the effect of succession taxes on family firm investment evidence from a natural experiment this paper provides causal evidence on the impact of succession taxes on firm investment decisions and transfer of control using a 2002 policy change in greece that substantially reduced the tax on intrafamily transfers of businesses i show that succession taxes lead to a more than 40 decline in investment around family successions slow sales growth and a depletion of cash reserves furthermore succession taxes strongly affect the decision to sell or retain the firm within the family i conclude by discussing implications of my findings for firms in the united states and europe

does the market value ceo styles abstract we study how investors perceive the skill set that different types of ceos bring into their companies we compare ceos who started their careers during a recession with other ceos we show

enriching a theory of wage and promotion dynamics inside firms in previous work we showed that a model that integrates job assignment human capital acquisition and learning can explain several empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics inside firms in this article we extend that model in two ways first we incorporate schooling and derive further testable implications that we then compare with the available empirical evidence second and more important we show that introducing task specific human capital allows us to produce cohort effects we further argue that task specific human capital is a realistic concept and may have many important implications we also discuss limitations of our extended approach

the making of an investment banker stock market shocks career choice and lifetime income i show that stock market shocks have important and lasting effects on the careers of mbas stock market conditions while mba students are in school have a large effect on whether they go directly to wall street upon graduation further starting on wall street immediately upon graduation causes a person to be more likely to work there later and to earn on average substantially more money the empirical results suggest that investment bankers are largely made by circumstance rather than born to work on wall street

the characteristics of family firms exploiting information on ownership kinship and governance using total population data family firms are often considered characteristically different from non family firms however our understanding of family firms suffers from an inability to identify them in total population data information is rarely available regarding owners their kinship and their involvement in firm governance we present a method for identifying domiciled family firms using register data this method offers greater accuracy than previous methods we apply this method to swedish data concerning firm ownership governance and kinship from 2004 to 2010 we find that the family firm is a significant organizational form contributing over one third of all employment and gross domestic product gdp family firms are common in most industries and range in size furthermore we find that compared to private non family firms family firms have fewer total assets employment and sales and carry higher solidity although family firms are more profitable these differences diminish with firm size we conclude that the term family firm includes a large variety of firms and we call for increased attention to their heterogeneity

pricing decisions of the newspaper monopolist in nearly every city in the united states there is only one daily newspaper of general interest given the prevalence of monopoly it seems anomalous that newspapers are typically sold well below cost compaine 5 19 for example reports that sales revenue is only 28 7 percent of total cost moreover it appears that price is below marginal cost since the sales revenue does not cover the cost of the ink and paper used in producing the newspaper 2 if the newspaper publisher were selling only newspapers he or she would be in dire straits but in reality the publisher has two products to sell the newspaper itself and advertising space within the newspaper although very few newspaper customers are also purchasers of advertising space there is an important interaction between the circulation of the newspaper and the sale of advertising space the higher the circulation of the newspaper the greater the demand for advertising and the more advertising there is in the newspaper the greater the circulation of the newspaper 3 as a consequence the publisher has a more complicated pricing problem since the prices of advertising space and of the newspaper have feedback effects upon one another in the next section of this paper we shall derive the publisher s optimal prices for advertising space and for the newspaper under fairly general conditions one purpose of this analysis is to show that there are two meaningful measures of demand elasticity in section iv we discuss some of the associated empirical problems that this poses and relate this to two existing newspaper demand studies

creating value by changing the old guard the impact of controlling shareholder heterogeneity on firm performance and corporate policies theory suggests that controlling shareholders can influence firm value through both shared benefits creation and private benefits consumption using negotiated control block transfers from 31 countries we look beyond ownership concentration and investigate how controlling shareholder heterogeneity influences the relative importance of these two effects we document that a control transfer precipitates positive firm outcomes particularly when the vendor has maintained control over an extended period and the acquirer displays a strong incentive to engage in restructuring in such cases we observe a sustained positive price reaction more focused corporate investments lower leverage higher operating efficiency and superior long term performance

entrenchment governance and the stock price reaction to sudden executive deaths abstract to study managerial entrenchment i use the stock price reaction to unexpected senior executive deaths if a highly effective manager dies unexpectedly the stock price reaction should be negative if however death removes an entrenched manager when the board would or could not the stock price reaction should be positive while individually age and tenure only weakly correlate with the stock price reaction to a sudden death the reaction is strongly positive 6 8 if 1 the executive s tenure exceeds 10 years and 2 abnormal stock returns over the last three years are negative