Organizations and Markets

“This Paper Fills a Much-Needed Gap in the Literature”: Today’s Edition

15 December 2009 at 11:36 am Peter G. Klein 4 comments

| Peter Klein |

I was thumbing through the MDE issue containing Lasse and Nicolai’s paper when this sentence caught my eye: “Despite the widespread use of the production frontier approach to assess the efficiency of firms, there are no studies on ski lift operators.”

OK, I actually like the paper, “Are Multi-Resort Ski Conglomerates More Efficient?” by Martin Falk. It shows that resorts affiliated with a particular operator, Intrawest, have higher efficiency scores than independent resorts (and those affiliated with other ski conglomerates). There isn’t much theory, and I worry about endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity — the major themes in recent empirical work on diversification — but I certainly agree that parental affiliation is an important, and often overlooked, issue. (Indeed, one of my favorite Brad De Long papers, from the old days before he became a full-time polemicist, deals with this problem.)

Maybe I’m just jealous that I didn’t think of this particular application when doing my own research on conglomerates. Oh, the travel grants I could have applied for!

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