-
Human Capital of Spinouts
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-06
This study examines how the human capital of spinout founders and the performance of parent
firms affect the success of spinouts by using a matched employer-employee dataset of new ventures covering 7 SIC 1-digit sectors in the United States. Our data cover 29,100 spinouts and 379,800 new ventures formed by lone entrepreneurs in 23 states between 1992 and 2005. We evaluate several components of human capital: outcomes of human capital investments vs. human capital investments, task-related human capital vs. non-task-related human capital, and individual human capital vs. group capital, and examine whether these types of human capital affect spinout performance differently. We find that spinout founder's earnings (an outcome of human capital investment) and industry experience (task-related human capital) prior to spinout formation have strong positive correlations with spinout performance, as measured by size, wage and growth rate. We also find that group experience of spinout founders prior to spinout formation has a positive correlation with spinout performance, though this effect is slightly weaker and smaller than those of spinout founder's earnings and industry experience. The effects of these three measures of human capital are mostly present after controlling for parent firm establishment fixed effects. We find some evidence that the size of parent firm establishments has a positive correlation with spinout performance, but this effect does not hold after controlling for parent firm fixed effects. Finally, we find that founder's earnings, industry experience, group experience and parent firm size are more important during the early stage of spinout formation.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
PRODUCTIVITY, RESTRUCTURING, AND THE GAINS FROM TAKEOVERS
April 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-18
This paper investigates how takeovers create value. Using plant-level data, I show that acquirers increase targets' productivity through more efficient use of capital and labor. Acquirers significantly reduce capital expenditures, wages, and employment in target plants, though output is unchanged. Acquirers improve targets'investment efficiency through better capital reallocation. Moreover, changes in productivity help explain the merging firms' announcement returns. The combined announcement returns are driven by improvements in target's productivity. Targets with greater productivity improvements receive higher premiums. These results provide some first empirical evidence on the relation between productivity and stock returns in the context of takeovers.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Evolving Property Rights and Shifting Organizational Forms: Evidence From Joint-Venture Buyouts Following China's WTO Accession
March 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-05
China's WTO accession offers a rare opportunity to observe multinationals' response to changes in property rights in a developing country. WTO accession reduced incentives for joint ventures while reducing constraints on wholly owned foreign subsidiaries. Concomitant with these changes was a more liberal investment environment for indigenous investors. An adaptation of Feenstra and Hanson's (2005) property rights model suggests that higher the productivity and value added of the joint venture, but the lower its domestic sales share, the more likely the venture is to be become wholly foreign owned following liberalization. Theory also suggests that an enterprise with lower productivity but higher value added and domestic sales will be more likely to switch from a joint venture to wholly domestic owned. Using newly created enterprise-level panel data on equity joint ventures and changes in registration type following China's WTO accession, we find evidence consistent with the property rights theory. More highly productive firms with higher value added and lower domestic sales shares are more likely to become wholly foreign owned, while less productive firms focused on the Chinese market are more likely to become wholly domestic owned rather than remain joint ventures. In addition to highlighting the importance of incomplete contracts and property rights in the international organization of production, these results support the view that external commitment to liberalization through WTO accession influences multinational and indigenous firms' behavior.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Delegation in Multi-Establishment Firms: The Organizational Structure of I.T. Purchasing Authority
October 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-35
A rare large-scale empirical study of delegation within firms, this paper investigates how decision rights over information technology investments are allocated within multi-establishment firms. The core results indicate that a relatively high contribution to firm sales is highly correlated with authority being delegated to the local establishment. Firm-wide operational complexity and local information advantages are also associated with local discretion for IT purchases. Certain IT investments are also positively correlated with delegation. On the other hand, significant operational interdependencies evince a positive correlation with centralization, as do productive similarities among establishments. Surprisingly, absolute size of the firm and having a large IT budget are also correlated with centralized IT decision-making. With the exception of these latter effects, the results are consistent with models of organizational design that predict delegation where there is great demand for locally adapted choices and centralization where firm-wide coordination is most important. The findings document and make sense of widespread heterogeneity in decision rights across a range of firm and industry settings ' even among establishments belonging to the same parent firm. Finally, they suggest important considerations for future empirical and theoretical research into the determinants of delegation.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Employee Capitalism or Corporate Socialism? Broad-Based Employee Stock Ownership
December 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-44
How employee share ownership plans (ESOPs) affect employee compensation and shareholder value depends on the size. Small ESOPs, defined as those controlling less than 5% of outstanding shares, benefit both workers and shareholders, implying positive productivity gains. However, the effects of large ESOPs on worker compensation and shareholder value are more or less neutral, suggesting little productivity gains. These differential effects appear to be due to two non-value-creating motives specific to large ESOPS: (1) To form management-worker alliances ala Pagano and Volpin (2005), wherein management bribes workers to garner worker support in thwarting hostile takeover threats and (2) To substitute wages with ESOP shares by cash constrained firms. Worker compensation increases when firms under takeover threats adopt large ESOPs, but only if the firm operates in a non-competitive industry. The effects on firm valuation also depend on the strength of product market competition: When the competition is strong (weak), most of the productivity gains accrue to employees (shareholders). Competitive industry also implies greater job mobility within the industry, enabling workers to take a greater portion of productivity gains.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Information Technology, Capabilities and Asset Ownership: Evidence from Taxicab Fleets
November 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-39
We examine how information technology (IT) influences asset ownership through its impact on firms' and agents' capabilities. In particular, we propose that when IT is a substitute for agents' industry-specific human capital, IT adoption leads to increased vertical integration. We test this prediction using micro data on vehicle ownership patterns from the Economic Census during a period when computerized dispatching systems were first adopted by taxicab firms. The empirical tests exploit exogenous variation in local market conditions, to identify the impact of dispatching technology on firm asset ownership. The results show that firms increase the proportion of taxicabs owned by 12% when they adopt new computerized dispatching systems. The findings suggest that firms increasingly vertically integrate when they acquire resources that substitute for their agents' capabilities.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Why Do Firms Own Production Chains?
September 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-31
Many firms own links of production chains--i.e., they own both upstream and downstream plants in vertically linked industries. We use broad-based yet detailed data from the economy's goods-producing sectors to investigate the reasons for such vertical ownership. It does not appear that vertical ownership is usually used to facilitate transfers of goods along the production chain, as is often presumed. Shipments from firms' upstream units to their downstream units are surprisingly low, relative to both the firms' total upstream production and their downstream needs. Roughly one-third of upstream plants report no shipments to their firms' downstream units. Half ship less than three percent of their output internally. We do find that manufacturing plants in vertical ownership structures have high measures of 'type' (productivity, size, and capital intensity). These patterns primarily reflect selective sorting of high plant types into large firms; once we account for firm size, vertical structure per se matters much less. We propose an alternative explanation for vertical ownership that is consistent with these results. Namely, that rather than moderating goods transfers down production chains, it instead allows more efficient transfers of intangible inputs (e.g., managerial oversight) within the firm. We document some suggestive evidence of this mechanism.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Gender Differences in Business Performance: Evidence from the Characteristics of Business Owners Survey
December 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-39
Using confidential microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we investigate the performance of female-owned businesses making comparisons to male-owned businesses. Using regression estimates and a decomposition technique, we explore the role that human capital, especially through prior work experience, and financial capital play in contributing to why female-owned businesses have lower survival rates, profits, employment and sales. We find that female-owned businesses are less successful than male-owned businesses because they have less startup capital, and business human capital acquired through prior work experience in a similar business and prior work experience in family business. We also find some evidence that femaleowned businesses work fewer hours and may have different preferences for the goals of their business.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Horizontal Diversification and Vertical Contracting: Firm Scope and Asset Ownership in Taxi Fleets
May 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-10
This paper considers the vertical implications of horizontal diversification. Many studies have documented organizational problems following corporate diversification. We propose that selective vertical dis-integration ' shifting asset ownership to agents ' can mitigate rent-seeking and coordination failures in the diversified firm. We test this proposition in a particularly simple setting that allows us to isolate the effects of interest and control for the likely endogeneity of diversification: taxi fleets that diversify into the limousine, or black car, segment following a wave of entry deregulation in the early 1990s. The results show that taxi fleets are substantially more likely to use owner-operator drivers following diversification. Moreover, diversified fleets that use a greater share of owner operators are more productive than diversified fleets that own most of their vehicles. We interpret these findings as evidence that firms re-organize in response to the challenges of diversification, and that there are causal links between the horizontal and vertical boundaries of the fleet.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Access to Financial Capital Among U.S. Businesses: The Case of African-American Firms
December 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-33
The differences between African-American business ownership rates and white business ownership rates are striking. Estimates from the 2000 Census indicate that 11.8 percent of white workers are self-employed business owners, compared with only 4.8 percent of black workers. Furthermore, black-white differences in business ownership rates have remained roughly constant over most of the twentieth century (Fairlie and Meyer 2000). In addition to lower rates of business ownership, black-owned businesses are less successful on average than are white or Asian firms. In particular, black-owned businesses have lower sales, hire fewer employees and have smaller payrolls than white- or Asian-owned businesses, on average (U.S. Census Bureau 2001, U.S. Small Business Administration 2001). Black firms also have lower profits and higher closure rates than white firms (U.S. Census Bureau 1997, U.S. Small Business Administration 1999). For most outcomes, the disparities are extremely large. For example, estimates from the 2002 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) indicate that white firms have average sales of $437,870 compared with only $74,018 for black firms.
View Full
Paper PDF
