Successful product innovation leads to the decision by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to enter the export market. We argue that in addition to a direct effect of innovation on exports, product ...innovation, through its effect on firm productivity, increases the likelihood of the firm entering the export market. Using a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms, we show that the strong positive association found between firm productivity and exports in the literature relates to the firm's earlier innovation decisions, and that, when controlling for product innovation, the relationship between productivity and exports vanishes for these innovating firms.
Post-Soviet social Collier, Stephen J
2011., 20110808, 2011, 2011-08-08
eBook
The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across ...a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken--casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In Post-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state.
This paper investigates the market's reaction to U.K. insider transactions and analyzes whether the reaction depends on the firm's ownership. We present three major findings. First, differences in ...regulation between the U.K. and United States, in particular the speedier reporting of trades in the U.K., may explain the observed larger abnormal returns in the U.K. Second, ownership by directors and outside shareholders has an impact on the abnormal returns. Third, it is important to adjust for news released before directors' trades. In particular, trades preceded by news on mergers and acquisitions and CEO replacements contain significantly less information.
This paper looks at the probability of introducing innovations by manufacturing firms at different stages of their lives. Once differences related to activity and size are controlled for, we examine ...how the probability of innovation varies over entry, post-entry ages, and advanced ages of mature firms. We also measure the association between exit from the market and pre-exit innovation. Results show that the probability of innovating widely varies by activity, and that small size per se broadly reduces the probability of innovation, but also that entrant firms tend to present the highest probability of innovation while the oldest firms tend to show lower innovative probabilities. Some sets of firms with intermediate ages also present a high probability of innovation, and exiting firms are clearly associated to lower levels of introducing process innovations.
We examine the effect of ill health on retirement decisions in Britain, using the British Household Panel Survey (1991–1998). As self-reported health status is likely to be endogenous to the ...retirement decision, we instrument self-reported health by a constructed ‘health stock’ measure using a set of health indicator variables and personal characteristics, as suggested by Bound et al. (Bound, J., Schoenbaum, M., Stinebrickner, T.M., Waidmann, M., 1999. The dynamic effects of health on the labor force transitions of older workers. Labour Economics 6, 179–202). Using a range of econometric techniques, we show that adverse shocks to individual health stocks predict individual retirement behaviour among workers aged from 50 until state pension age. We compare responses of economic activity to constructed health measures with that arising using direct indicators of functional limitations and specific health problems. We also examine the dynamics of health shocks and whether adverse and positive health shocks have symmetric effects on transitions in and out of economic activity.
We apply a normalization of deviance model to understand the prevalence of the illegal practice of wage arrears, the delayed payment of wages, in Russia during the 1990s. Viewing organizational ...deviance as potentially self-reinforcing, we hypothesize that the frequent adoption of a deviant practice within a community makes it more likely that firms in that community will engage in deviance and less likely that injured stakeholders will oppose it. Our empirical analysis of wage arrears in Russia, based on panel data from a large, nationally representative sample of agricultural and industrial enterprises, supports our hypotheses.
Drawing on agency theory, corporate governance, and international business literatures, we develop arguments relating equity ownership structures and CEO compensation mix to a firm's choice of ...foreign market entry modes. Based on a sample of 432 foreign market entries by 118 non-diversified firms in the US manufacturing sector between 1991 and 1998, our findings indicate that greater equity ownership by institutional shareholders and inside directors is positively associated with a preference for full-control entry modes. In addition, our results suggest that CEOs with a greater proportion of pay tied to firm long-term performance are more inclined to choose full-control entry modes over shared-control modes.
In this paper we make use of a matched employer-employee database for Italy to look at the spatial distribution of wages. Using this rich database we aim to open up the black box of agglomeration ...economies exploiting the micro dimension of interaction among economic agents, both individuals and firms. We provide evidence that firm size and, especially, skills are sorted across space and account for a large portion of the spatial wage variation. Our data also support the assortative matching hypothesis, which we show not to be driven by co-location of good workers and firms. Finally, we point out that assortative matching is negatively related to local market size. /// Dans ce texte, les auteurs utilisent des données italiennes qui apparient employeurs et employés pour étudier la répartition spatiale des salaires. Ils visent à faire la lumière sur les économies d'agglomération en sondant les interactions au niveau micro entre les agents économiques - individus et entreprises. Les résultats montrent que la taille des firmes et les compétences se déploient différemment dans l'espace et que ces variations expliquent une bonne portion de la variation spatiale des salaires. Les données supportent l'hypothèse d'un arrimage des compétences avec la taille des firmes dont on montre qu'il n'est pas engendré par la co-localisation des meilleurs travailleurs et firmes. Finalement, on montre que l'arrimage est inversement co-relié avec la taille du marché local.
Recently, questions about gender gaps in science have extended to academic technology transfer. Using systematic data on US medical school faculty, we capture both behavior and performance, examining ...the hypothesis that women are less likely than men to commercialize their research findings. We pooled faculty invention data from ten departments in three Academic Health Centers from 1991 to 1998—a period when patenting had become prevalent and other researchers note that a gender gap was pronounced. Rather than focusing on patenting, we capture the first step in the commercialization process, as well as the subsequent successful licensing of faculty inventions to a company. We find no significant gender differences in the likelihood of reporting inventions or successfully commercializing them. We do find differences in the number of inventions reported, however, with women disclosing fewer inventions than their male counterparts. Our results demonstrate that gender effects are highly conditioned by employment context and resources. We attribute differences in our findings with regards to gender to the use of outcome measures that capture both behavior and performance, and the inclusion of a more extensive set of control variables.
This study analyzes the impact of corporate governance structures at the initial public offering (IPO) date. We test hypotheses that firms with more shareholder‐oriented governance structures receive ...higher valuations at the IPO stage and have better long‐term performance. Our sample is a set of 107 IPOs of real estate investment trusts (REITs) between 1991 and 1998. Using a single industry and REITs in particular reduces potentially confounding effects due to differences in risk, transparency, and growth potential. We believe this—combined with our use of IPOs—mitigates the endogeneity problem present in studies of the impact of governance on seasoned firms’ valuation. Our analysis indicates that firms with stronger governance structures have higher IPO valuations and better long‐term operating performance than their peers.
PDF
