Organizations and Markets

Debt, Relationship-Specific Investments, and Boundaries

15 May 2009 at 5:39 am Lasse Leave a comment

| Lasse Lien |

Here is a link to a nice paper by Jayant R. Kalea and Husayn Shahrurb from JFE back in 2007. The key finding in the paper is that low leverage is used as a commitment device to induce customers and suppliers to make relationship-specific investments (RSI). In short; the higher the need for RSI, the lower the choice of leverage. This raises some intriguing questions about the financial crisis. On the one hand the crisis should generally reduce the willingness to make RSI, as leverage and bankruptcy risks are driven upwards. Presumably then, firms will want to take compensating measures, but what can those measures be? The classical Williamsonian response would be vertical integration. For a given sensitivity to RSI, the inventive to integrate vertically should be strongest for highly leveraged firms. But who would want to integrate with a highly leveraged firm in these times? Or vertically integrate with any firm for that matter? And if the crisis is a temporary phenomenon, vertical integration seems pretty drastic. Another obvious counter measure would be to reduce leverage. That is of course easier said than done during the crisis. A third alternative is increased use of hybrids and alliances of various kinds, but it is difficult to see how this can alleviate the fundamental problem of liquidation risk. So is bruxism the only option?

Entry filed under: - Lien -, Strategic Management, Theory of the Firm.