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

property rights externalities and resource degradation locating the tragedy abstract resource degradation in the third world is largely driven by the demands of farm households for fuelwood and land for agriculture since resources are often controlled through indigenous systems of property the tragedy of the commons has been used to explain resource degradation as a result private property is suggested as a solution to resource degradation a dynamic model capable of examining household incentives for resource use under private and common property is developed results of the model reject the conventional wisdom that gives rise to the presumed optimality of private individual property in natural resources and the correlated indictment of group management regimes

candidate reputations and the incumbency effect abstract a major shortcoming of the classical median voter model is that its central prediction convergence of platforms to the median voter s ideal is seldom observed one reason is that the classical model neglects the importance of voter expectations as a determinant of votes here we associate voters expectations about candidates with past as well as current candidate pronouncements and assume that incumbents whose actions are consistent with their reputations are perceived as less risky than challengers in equilibrium candidates choose distinct platforms typically neither adopts the median voter s ideal point either candidate may win depending on how well the incumbent s reputation reflects current voter tastes and how relatively risky the electorate perceives the challenger to be

the ambiguous impact of inequality on local resource management abstract the impact of inequality on the ability of human groups to undertake successful collective action is investigated with special reference to overexploitation of common property resources in voluntary provision problems on the one hand inequality has an ambiguous impact on the feasibility of the efficient outcome even though better endowed agents contribute more to collective action in regulated settings on the other hand inequality tends to reduce the acceptability of available regulatory schemes and therefore to make collective action more difficult

ten little treasures of game theory and ten intuitive contradictions this paper reports laboratory data for games that are played only once these games span the standard categories static and dynamic games with complete and incomplete information for each game the treasure is a treatment in which behavior conforms nicely to predictions of the nash equilibrium or relevant refinement in each case however a change in the payoff structure produces a large inconsistency between theoretical predictions and observed behavior these contradictions are generally consistent with simple intuition based on the interaction of payoff asymmetries and noisy introspection about others decisions

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

small is bountiful labor markets and establishment size although there exist no detailed published studies on trends in workplace size most research in stratification and industrial sociology has operated with the implicit assumption that in the course of the twentieth century workers have found themselves in increasingly larger establishments this assumption has focused considerable attention on such concomitants of the assumed increase as growth in bureaucratic control and internal labor markets this paper gives thefirst systematic empirical account of the evolution of workplace size and presents results that call into question the appropriateness of the current allocation of research energy it is suggested that far more attention be paid to analysis of small firms and establishments it is well known that one of the major changes in the organization of work during the twentieth century has been the shift from small to large employers in contested terrain edwards 1979 vii notes that seventy five or a hundred years ago nearly all employees worked for small firms while today large numbers toil for the giant corporations from the theory of segmented labor markets we know that the internal labor market in the large company has become an increasingly standard locale for intragenerational mobility and that as thurow points out the need for on the job training leads employers to eliminate competition for jobs among those who must train one another the net result is the formation of a series of internal labor markets with limited ports of entry thurow 1975 85 86 dunlop 1966 32 observes in a similar vein that for the typical enterprise hiring in jobs are only a small fraction of the total number of job classifications the forces that have brought about this transformation of the workplace have been extensively documented advances in technology have facilitated increasingly large operations with corresponding scale

irrigation water pricing differential impacts on irrigated farms european water policy as set out in the water framework directive wfd requires all eu member states to implement volumetric water pricing at rates that roughly cover the total costs of providing water services the objective of this paper is to develop a methodology that for the different types of farm in an irrigable area will enable us to analyse the differential impact that a pricing policy for irrigation water would have for this purpose multi attribute utility theory maut mathematical programming models were used the methodology is implemented on a representative area in the duero valley in spain our results show the usefulness of differential analysis in evaluating the impact of a water pricing policy this allows significant differences in the evolution of agricultural incomes to be observed as well as the recovery of costs by the state demand for agricultural employment and the consumption of agrochemicals resulting from rising prices of irrigation water in various groups of farmers within a given irrigated area

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

common property institutions and sustainable governance of resources abstract the literature on common property based resource management comprises many important studies that seek to specify the conditions under which groups of users will self organize and sustainably govern resources upon which they depend using three of the more comprehensive such studies and with an extensive review of writings on the commons this paper demonstrates that the enterprise of generating lists of conditions under which commons are governed sustainably is a flawed and impossibly costly research task for a way out the paper examines the relative merits of statistical comparative and case study approaches to studying the commons it ends with a plea for careful research design and sample selection construction of causal mechanisms and a shift toward comparative and statistical rather than single case analyses such steps are necessary for a coherent empirically relevant theory of the commons

water markets design and evidence from experimental economics market mechanisms are gaining increasing acceptance all over the world as a way of making more efficient use of scarce water resources designing regulatory frameworks that ensure both inter and intra temporal efficient allocations is a daunting task especially if supply is stochastic and there is ample storage capacity in addition to defining tradable rights specific provisions must regulate the use of reservoirs commonly water statutes include provisions that establish asymmetries regarding the allocation of water and market restrictions that ban water trading across different users in this article we use data collected in a laboratory to test two specific market regulations included in the 1999 water reform in spain first junior right holders are not allowed to buy water from senior users second the law does not explicitly define water rights over units left in reservoirs for the following season results suggest that trading restrictions among water right holders lead to welfare losses for senior users it is shown that removing this restriction would increase senior right holders benefits without reducing those of junior users results show that defining water rights over saved units across periods would increase the average stock levels of reservoirs and reduce market price instability the lessons learned from the spanish experience are applicable to settings characterized by unstable natural water supply and the availability of large storage facilities

who leaves money on the table the role of founder identity in hong kong abstractthis study investigates the effect of corporate governance factors on the underpricing of initial public offerings ipos in hong kong and the results show that this effect is significant ipos are categorized into four subgroups based on the role of the founder 1 no founder firms companies with no specific founder 2 pure founder firms companies whose founder is neither the company s chairman of the board nor its ceo 3 founder chairman ceo firms companies whose founder is either the company s chairman of the board or its ceo and 4 founder chairman ceo firms companies whose founder is the chairman and ceo the results demonstrate a significant descending pattern for the underpricing level of the four subgroups which can be explained by the varying incentive and behaviour mechanisms that result from the various founder identities

founder s human capital external investment and the survival of new high technology ventures the effect of founder characteristics in attracting external investment and enhancing survival of new high technology ventures is explored using human capital theory and signalling theory we test the effect of founder characteristics on external investment in and survival of new high technology ventures by tracking a random sample of 193 high technology start ups all participants in the israeli technology incubator program founder s business management expertise and academic status attracted external investment but founder s general technological expertise did not founder s business management expertise and general technological expertise positively affected venture survival but founder s academic status did not possible implications for entrepreneurs investors policy and further research are discussed

how much prestige is enough assessing the value of multiple types of high status affiliates for young firms abstract young unproven firms can signal their worthiness or potential through affiliations with various types of prestigious parties drawing from signaling theory we present a formal consideration of the implications of multiple numbers and types of prestigious affiliates for ipo valuations we argue that different types of prestigious affiliates prestigious executives directors venture capital firms and underwriters convey different signals of ipo worth depending on the extent to which they provide certification or substantive benefits based on a sample of 257 software ipos we find considerable support for our expectations the benefits of prestigious executives and directors accumulate in a linear more is better fashion in contrast the payoffs from vc and underwriter prestige accumulate in a curvilinear fashion we discuss the theoretical implications of these findings and propose an agenda for future research

the fallacy of only the strong survive the effects of extrinsic motivation on the persistence decisions for under performing firms abstract under performing firms persist even though existing theoretical perspectives indicate that they should be selected out of the market building upon threshold theory gimeno j folta t cooper a woo c 1997 survival of the fittest entrepreneurial human capital and the persistence of underperforming firms administrative science quarterly 42 750 783 and using staw s staw b m 1981 the escalation of commitment to a course of action academy of management review 6 4 577 587 theoretical model of commitment to a course of action we explore and test the factors that lead entrepreneurs to persist with under performing firms we found environmental munificence personal investment personal options previous organizational success and perceived collective efficacy impact the decision to persist with an under performing firm in addition extrinsic motivation moderates those relationships this research adds to the growing literature on highly persistent under performing firms and complements and extends threshold theory

strategic interaction and the statistical analysis of international conflict although strategic interaction is at the heart of most international relations theory it has largely been missing from much empirical analysis in the field typical applications of logit and probit to theories of international conflict generally do not capture the structure of the strategic interdependence implied by those theories i demonstrate how to derive statistical discrete choice models of international conflict that directly incorporate the theorized strategic interaction i show this for a simple crisis interaction model and then use monte carlo analysis to show that logit provides estimates with incorrect substantive interpretations as well as fitted values that can be far from the true values finally i reanalyze a well known game theoretic model of war bueno de mesquita and lalman s 1992 international interaction game my results indicate that there is at best modest empirical support for their model

entrepreneurial exit as a critical component of the entrepreneurial process theoretical development abstract by demonstrating the importance of entrepreneurial exit to the entrepreneur the firm the industry and the economy i contend that our understanding of the entrepreneurial process is incomplete without the inclusion of entrepreneurial exit i define entrepreneurial exit and demonstrate how this conceptualization provides concepts that are unique from those addressed by researchers in other domains thus outlining a space for it within the literature in each phase of the entrepreneurial process i explore the development of an exit strategy reasons for exit and options for exit

economic growth and the evolution of water consumption in spain a structural decomposition analysis abstract the aim of this paper is to examine how technology processes of input substitution and changes in final demand all of which underlie economic growth influence water consumption this analysis is undertaken for spain during a significant socio economic period from 1980 the beginning of the democratic era to 2007 the onset of the current economic crisis to this end we construct water consumption series linked to a time series of input output tables generated for the spanish economy and we develop a structural decomposition analysis to study mainly changes in water consumption embodied in final demand we find that the growth in spanish demand all other things being constant would have implied an increase in water consumption almost three times the growth actually observed however this demand effect is largely offset by technology and intensity effects mainly due to changes in agricultural crops given the importance of the demand growth the final demand effect is also analyzed in detail broken down by categories as well as level and composition household demand and the increase of exports appear as key explicative factors

no news is bad news sensegiving activities media attention and venture capital funding of new technology organizations a significant body of research has examined how new organizations gain legitimacy and how gaining it affects their subsequent access to resources less attention has been given to the problem of how new organizations attract collective attention although related to legitimation the problem of attracting attention is distinct as attention and evaluation are distinct cognitive processes in this study we examine the allocation of collective attention to new organizations in a system of relationships within which new organizations seek to attract attention through their sensegiving activities the information properties of their sensegiving activities affect the level of attention they receive from different types of media and media attention in turn increases their perceived value potential in the eyes of venture capital investors vcs we examine these relationships in a sample of 398 information technology start ups that have obtained different levels of venture capital funding our results show that new organizations that engage in more intense and diverse sensegiving activities attract higher levels of industry media attention and that these effects are enhanced by the human capital of their founders and leaders diverse sensegiving activities are also associated with higher levels of attention from the general media but only the attention of specialized industry media is positively associated with the level of vc funding obtained these findings extend current research on information intermediation and institutional legitimation by demonstrating that media attention early in the life of new organizations affects how they are valued by a well informed expert audience such as vcs they also contribute to entrepreneurship research on the effects of new organizations strategies on their ability to secure resources and to research on vc funding decisions

the first deal the division of founder equity in new ventures we examine the trade off between efficiency and equality within the context of entrepreneurial founding teams using a formal theory where founders may have preferences over relative outcomes we derive predictions about the antecedents and consequences of dividing equity equally amongst all founders using proprietary survey data we empirically test the predictions our central finding is that teams that split equity equally are less likely to raise funds from outside investors the relationship appears not to be causal but instead driven by selection effects across heterogeneous teams with varying degrees of inequality aversion

dissecting the tragedy a spatial model of behavior in the commons abstract much of the discussion of the tragedy of the commons focuses on aggregate impacts often in data poor developing country settings few non experimental empirical studies shed light on contextual circumstances driving the extent of rent dissipation and overexploitation we utilize a high resolution data set to estimate a behavioral model of fishermen s spatial choices a unique policy setting allows us to measure the degree to which individual fishermen s choices appear aimed at mitigating the tragedy of the commons in a small numbers setting we find evidence of partial mitigation in excess of what we would expect under pure self interest but short of what would occur under group maximizing behavior we also examine how contextual factors in the fishery shape the degree of cooperation within the fishing season and find evidence that competition for the common pool resource distorts fishermen s implicit cost of distance creating a form of common property inertia

cooperation in common property regimes under extreme drought conditions empirical evidence from the use of pooled transferable quotas in spanish irrigation systems the success of a common property regime can be partially judged on the basis of its ability to handle extreme events that stress its capacity for cooperation this paper compares the performance of 38 irrigation associations in a large irrigation area in spain during a severe drought as a test of hypotheses derived from property right theories the case is particularly interesting because it contains a transferable quota institution that can potentially strengthen the effectiveness of common property regimes in scarcity conditions according to the results the use of transferable quotas across associations can contribute to cooperation and drought performance in this context performance is higher when the associations enjoy 1 effective monitoring systems 2 experience and legitimate leaders and 3 facilitative biophysical conditions like soil water holding capacity the analysis also suggests that biophysical properties like soil water holding capacity may compensate for weaker monitoring or leadership and vice versa

watershed partnerships and the emergence of collective action institutions this paper examines the emergence of local cooperative institutions watershed partnerships that resolve collective action problems involved in the management of natural resources the political contracting approach to institutional supply suggests that watershed partnerships are more likely to emerge when potential benefits outweigh the transaction costs of developing and maintaining new institutions we analyze the impact of social political economic and ecological features of watersheds that affect benefits and transaction costs on the emergence of 958 watershed partnerships in the more than 2 100 watersheds in the united states our findings demonstrate that watershed partnerships are most likely to emerge in watersheds confronting severe pollution problems associated with agricultural and urban runoff with low levels of command and control enforcement and containing the resources to offset transaction costs

doing more with less innovation input and output in family firms family firms are often portrayed as an important yet conservative form of organization that is reluctant to invest in innovation however simultaneously evidence has shown that family firms are flourishing and in fact constitute many of the world s most innovative firms our study contributes to disentangling this puzzling effect we argue that family firms owing to the family s high level of control over the firm wealth concentration and importance of nonfinancial goals invest less in innovation but have an increased conversion rate of innovation input into output and ultimately a higher innovation output than nonfamily firms empirical evidence from a meta analysis based on 108 primary studies from 42 countries supports our hypotheses we further argue and empirically show that the observed effects are even stronger when the ceo of the family firm is a later generation family member however when the ceo of the family firm is the firm s founder innovation input is higher and contrary to our initial expectations innovation output is lower than that in other firms we further show that the family firm innovation input output relationships depend on country level factors namely the level of minority shareholder protection and the education level of the workforce in the country

spatial collocation and venture capital in the us biotechnology industry biotechnology firms operate in a high risk and high reward environment and are in a constant race to secure venture capital vc funds previous contributions to the literature show that the vc firms tend to invest locally in order to monitor their investments and to provide operating assistance to their target firms further biotechnology is a knowledge based industry that tends to exhibit spatial clusters and the firms in such industries may collocate to benefit from gaining access to local markets for specialized inputs e g skilled researchers and from local knowledge spillovers and network externalities if such gains exist we expect that the collocated firms should exhibit positively correlated performance including in their ability to attract venture capital funds the purpose of this paper is to empirically measure the strength and spatial extent of the relationships among the amount of funds raised by proximate biotechnology firms we model these relationships with a spatial autoregression sar model and we control for characteristics of the biotechnology firms and the vc firms that provide their funds as well as site specific factors based on our fitted sar model we find that the amount of venture capital raised by a particular biotechnology firm is significantly influenced by the number of vc firms and the vc funding levels raised by biotechnology firms located within a 10 mile radius but these relationships are not statistically significant beyond this range

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

policy divergence in multicandidate probabilistic spatial voting existing models of multicandidate spatial competition with probabilistic voting typically predict a high degree of policy convergence yet in actual elections candidates advocate quite divergent sets of policies what accounts for this disparity between theory and empirical observation i introduce two variations on the basic probabilistic vote model which may account for candidate policy divergence 1 a model which incorporates candidate specific variables so that candidates may enjoy nonpolicy related electoral advantages or disadvantages 2 a model which allows nonzero correlations between the random terms associated with voters candidate utilities thereby capturing situations where voters view two or more candidates as similar on nonpolicy grounds i report candidate equilibrium analyses for each model which show far greater policy divergence than exists under the standard probabilistic vote model i then analyze the strategic logic which underlies these results

an experimental study of jury decision rules we present experimental results on groups facing a decision problem analogous to that faced by a jury we consider three treatment variables group size three or six number of votes needed for conviction majority or unanimity and pre vote deliberation we find evidence of strategic voting under the unanimity rule a large fraction of our subjects vote for a decision analogous to conviction even when their private information indicates a state analogous to innocence this is roughly consistent with the game theoretic predictions of feddersen and pesendorfer although individual behavior is explained well by the game theoretic model there are discrepancies at the level of the group decision contrary to feddersen and pesendorfer in our experiments there are fewer outcomes analogous to incorrect convictions under unanimity rule than under majority rule in the case of no deliberation we simultaneously account for the individual and group data using quantal response equilibrium

the effect of candidate quality on electoral equilibrium an experimental study when two candidates of different quality compete in a one dimensional policy space the equilibrium outcomes are asymmetric and do not correspond to the median there are three main effects first the better candidate adopts more centrist policies than the worse candidate second the equilibrium is statistical in the sense that it predicts a probability distribution of outcomes rather than a single degenerate outcome third the equilibrium varies systematically with the level of uncertainty about the location of the median voter we test these three predictions using laboratory experiments and find strong support for all three we also observe some biases and show that they can be explained by quantal response equilibrium

an analysis of congressional career decisions 1947 1986 most previous research on congressional career decisions has focused on one of two binary choices between retiring and running for reelection or between running for reelection and seeking higher office but most of the time representatives face all three choices simultaneously employing a mother logit model we estimate the effects of relevant variables both on pairwise comparisons conditional probabilities and on the unconditional probabilities of choosing each one of these three alternatives probably most intriguing is our finding that a member s age has little or no effect upon the unconditional probability of running for reelection the interrelatedness of career options is seen particularly clearly in the case of incumbents who had been redistricted out of their seats when they had an opportunity to run for higher office they were likely to take it only when they lacked such an opportunity were they more likely than other members to opt for retirement

founder ceo succession and the paradox of entrepreneurial success in the last few decades we have developed a substantial body of knowledge about ceo succession however except for some studies of family businesses that lack direct applicability to nonfamily ceo succession the past studies of succession have not examined the very first succession event in a firm when the founder ceo is replaced on a large scale basis the critical differences between later stage succession and founder ceo succession include the higher level of attachment between founder ceos and the firms they create the much larger equity holdings of founder ceos which give them much more control of the firm the fact that many founder ceos remain in the firm even though it is being run by their successors and the fact that nearly all early stage succession events involve outside successors in contrast to later stage succession research which has focused on the insider outsider distinction these differences make it hard to extrapolate from later stage succession findings to founder ceo succession therefore in order to examine founder ceo succession i used field research and grounded theory building to study the factors that should affect founder ceo succession in internet start ups i find that there are two central intertemporal events that may affect founder ceo succession the completion of product development and the raising of each round of financing from outside investors i develop testable hypotheses about how each of these events affect the rate of succession and then test these hypotheses using an event history analysis of a unique dataset containing the succession histories of 202 internet firms my findings point to multiple paradoxes of success in which the founder ceo s success at achieving critical milestones actually causes the chance of founder ceo succession to rise dramatically

a theory of voting in large elections this paper provides a game theoretic model of probabilistic voting and then examines the incentives faced by candidates in a spatial model of elections in our model voters strategies form a quantal response equilibrium qre which merges strategic voting and probabilistic behavior we first show that a qre in the voting game exists for all elections with a finite number of candidates and then proceed to show that with enough voters and the addition of a regularity condition on voters utilities a nash equilibrium profile of platforms exists when candidates seek to maximize their expected margin of victory this equilibrium 1 consists of all candidates converging to the policy that maximizes the expected sum of voters utilities 2 exists even when voters can abstain and 3 is unique when there are only 2 candidates