Posts filed under ‘Theory of the Firm’
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
| Peter Klein |
Interesting new NBER paper by Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen, “The Organization of Firms Across Countries” (ungated version here, may be older):
We argue that social capital as proxied by regional trust and the Rule of Law can improve aggregate productivity through facilitating greater firm decentralization. We collect original data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production and sales decisions from Corporate Head Quarters to local plant managers in almost 4,000 firms in the US, Europe and Asia. We find Anglo-Saxon and Northern European firms are much more decentralized than those from Southern Europe and Asia. Trust and the Rule of Law appear to facilitate delegation by improving co-operation, even when we examine “bilateral trust” between the country of origin and location for affiliates of multinational firms. We show that areas with higher trust and stronger rule of law specialize in industries that rely on decentralization and allow more efficient firms to grow in scale. Furthermore, even for firms of a given size and industry, trust and rule of law are associated with more decentralization which fosters higher returns from information technology (we find IT is complementary with decentralization). Finally, we find that non-hierarchical religions and product market competition are also associated with more decentralization. Together these cultural, legal and economic factors account for four fifths of the cross-country variation in the decentralization of power within firms.
The emphasis on institutional determinants of organizational form makes this a welcome addition to the (slim) set of papers relating institutional arrangements to the institutional environment. (more…)
Slides from Foss-Klein PhD Course
| Peter Klein |
Slides from the PhD course, “The Theory of the Firm and Its Applications in Management Research I,” are now available on the course webpage (scroll down to the bottom).
PS: Did you notice the course title ends with “I,” implying there will be a II and maybe a III? Gotta love that precommitment device. It’s as if Stallone had named his first film “Rocky I.”
Austrian Theory of the Firm Bleg
| Peter Klein |
This post is for devotees and fellow-travelers of the Austrian school. As some of you know I maintain an online bibliography of articles and books dealing with applications of Austrian economics to the theory of the firm (and strategic management more generally). Happily, this literature has grown dramatically in the last few years. Sadly, I have not had time to update the bibliography on a consistent basis. So, please send me your suggested additions and corrections (ideally with URLs). Self-nominations are welcome!
Events @CBS
| Peter Klein |
I’ve just arrived in Copenhagen, where I’m spending a month as a visiting professor at the SMG. Copenhagen Business School has become one of the most intellectually exciting places in Europe. This week alone the school is hosting the DRUID summer conference which features people like Anita McGahan, Sid Winter, Will Mitchell, Russ Coff, Mike Ryall, and many others, along with a workshop on corporate governance with keynotes by Mark Roe, Randall Morck, Annette Poulsen, and Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes Molina. Of course these are only appetizers for the next week’s main course, the PhD seminar on The Theory of the Firm and Its Applications in Management Research conducted by Professors F. and K. Truly an embarrassment of riches!
If You’re So Smart …
| Nicolai Foss |
… that it makes sense to delegate a lot of decision-making authority to you when you perform as an agent for a principal, you may also be so smart that you can game the incentive plan. In “Ability and Agency Costs: Evidence From Polish Banking,” Douglas Frank and Tomasz Obloj, both INSEAD, argue (rightly, IMO) that the link between cognitive ability and agency costs has not yet been studied in agency theory. (more…)
Is the Future in Contract Manufacturing?
| Benito Arruñada |
The purchase of Opel by Magna shows the strength of contract manufacturers and their strategies, which I discussed with Xosé H. Vázquez in our 2006 article in the Harvard Business Review. Once thought of as a lifebelt for the decreasing margins of large-brand owners, contract manufacturing has now become a major source of competition. Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC), which learned the business by producing initially for Volkswagen and GM, has actually started to sell its own cars in Europe and North America. It has even bought R&D knowledge, acquiring from bankrupt MG Rover the drawings needed to build the Rover 25, Rover 45, and Rover 75.
The economic crisis is accelerating this process. The need to liberate assets to increase ROI has been facilitated by technological and organizational change. This is stimulating business practices at the corporate level that are pushing outsourcing practices to dangerous limits. The wrong management of contract manufacturing will thus increasingly provoke knowledge leaks to direct competitors and the loss of internal manufacturing knowledge; more importantly, it will continue to eliminate barriers to entry, allowing large distributors and contract manufacturers themselves to market their own brands much more easily.
World Bank’s “Doing Business” Changing Course
| Benito Arruñada |
Thanks to O&M for the opportunity to join the conversation. I plan to be blogging about some issues discussed in my book.
One of my recent research areas is the cost of business formalization. In particular, I have criticized the World Bank’s Doing Business project for the narrow focus of its “Starting a Business” indicator on reducing the initial costs of incorporating companies (Arruñada, 2007, 2009), which disregards the more important role of business registers as a source of reliable information for judges, which is essential for reducing transaction costs in future business dealings. In many developing countries, registers produce documents that judges do not trust and, therefore, registration does not facilitate impersonal transactions that it should be supporting. Reducing the explicit cost of registers and speeding production of useless paperwork will not help. The priorities of reform policies should therefore be thoroughly reviewed, aiming first for registers to achieve a minimum reliability. (See this discussion).
In April, following continuing pressure by Barney Frank, chairman of the US House Financial Services Committee, the World Bank decided to drop Doing Business’s “Employing Workers Indicator” and develop a new “Worker Protection Indicator” after concluding that the first indicator “does not represent World Bank policy and should not be used as a basis for policy advice or in any country programme documents that outline or evaluate the development strategy or assistance programme for a recipient country” (Aslam, 2009).
In line with my argument about registration, meaningful indicators of institutional quality should be comprehensive of costs and values. Therefore, an indicator of the quality of employment regulation should consider not only workers’ protection but other aspects, such as, most prominently, unemployment rates.
Introducing Guest Blogger Benito Arruñada
| Peter Klein |
We’re delighted to announce Benito Arruñada as our newest guest blogger. Benito is Professor of Business Organization at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, a former President of ISNIE, and a prolific researcher in the areas of organization, law and economics. Most of his work focuses on the organizational conditions that facilitate impersonal exchange, from property titling or business regulation to moral systems. He has published widely in journals such the Journal of Law and Economics, Industrial & Corporate Change, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Journal of Comparative Economics, and International Review of Law and Economics.
Benito will be blogging about his new book on property and business formalization, Building Market Institutions: Property Rights, Business Formalization, and Economic Development, coming out next year from the University of Chicago Press, and other topics that strike his fancy. Welcome, Benito!
Research Workshop on Institutions and Organizations
| Peter Klein |
The IV Research Workshop on Institutions and Organizations takes place at Insper (formerly Ibmec) São Paulo 5-6 October 2009. Lee Alston and David Stark are keynoting. There are panels on “Judicial Norms and Development,” “New Theories of the Firm,” and “Social Capital and Organization.” There’s an open call for papers, with abstracts due 20 July.
I attended the 2007 version and enjoyed it very much.
More “New Economy” Hyperbole
| Peter Klein |
Wired’s Chris Anderson drinks the New Economy Kool-Aid. It’s the same old argument — information technology reduces transaction costs, leading to a radical disaggregation of industry and society — still supported by little more than a few colorful anecdotes, not any kind of systematic analysis. The new twist is the financial crisis, described by Anderson as “not just the trough of a cycle but the end of an era.”
What we have discovered over the past nine months are growing diseconomies of scale. Bigger firms are harder to run on cash flow alone, so they need more debt (oops!). Bigger companies have to place bigger bets but have less and less control over distribution and competition in an increasingly diverse marketplace. . . . The result is that the next new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small.
Nonsense. The major banks, the Chrysler corporation, and whoever is next to fail have not become nimbler and smaller, but larger; they have become part of the Federal government. Fannie and Freddie have swollen and taken on additional responsibilities. The financial crisis, as argued repeatedly on these pages, was spawned by a credit bubble brought about by loose monetary policy and massive government subsidization of the home mortgage market. It has nothing to do with firms being too large or somehow failing to take advantage of the Next Big Thing in social networking or cloud computing. I mean, seriously, is there anything here that couldn’t have been written ten years ago?
To all the usual reasons why small companies have an advantage, from nimbleness to risk-taking, add these new ones: The rise of cloud computing means that young firms no longer have to buy their own IT equipment, which helps them avoid having to raise money or take on debt. Likewise, the webification of the supply chain in many industries, from electronics to apparel, means that even the tiniest companies can now order globally, just like the giants. In the same way a musician with just a laptop and some gumption can accomplish most of what a record label does, an ambitious engineer can invent and produce a gadget with little more than that same laptop.
Bah. Humbug.
Elfenbein and Zenger on Social Capital
| Peter Klein |
Congratulations to Dan Elfenbein and Todd Zenger for winning the ACAC Best Paper Award for “The Economics of Social Capital in De-Socialized Exchange.” Their paper addresses one of my pet peeves, the expansive use of “capital” to describe any ill-defined substance that accumulates and has value. Hence knowledge, experience, and skills become “human capital” or “knowledge capital”; relationships become “social capital”; brand names become “reputation capital”; and so on. I fear this terminology obfuscates more than it clarifies.
I don’t mind using these terms in a loose, colloquial sense: By going to school I’m investing in human capital or diversifying my stock of human capital; if this gets me a high-paying job I’m earning a good return on my human capital; as I get old I forget new things, so my human capital is depreciating rapidly; and so on.
But we shouldn’t take these metaphors too literally. In economic theory capital refers either to financial capital or to a stock of heterogeneous alienable assets, goods that can be exchanged in markets and analyzed using price theory. Their rental prices are determined by marginal revenue products and their purchase prices are given by the present discounted value of these future rents. Knowledge is not, strictly speaking, capital, because it is not traded in markets does not have a rental or purchase price. What markets trade and price is labor services, and it is impossible to decompose the payments to labor (wages) into separate “effort” and “rental return on human capital” components. Some labor services command a higher market price than others because they have a higher marginal revenue product. Some of this wage premium may be due to intelligence or experience, some due to complementarities with other human or nonhuman assets, some due to hard work, and so on. But these are all determinants of the MRP, and hence the wage, not different kinds of factor returns. (more…)
ACAC Schedule
| Peter Klein |
The Atlanta Competitive Advantage Conference begins tomorrow. The updated schedule, along with other logistical information, is here. You can also download many of the papers. Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State Universities have co-hosted this event the past five years and it’s become one of the main events for research in strategy, organizational economics, entrepreneurship, and related fields.
Debt, Relationship-Specific Investments, and Boundaries
| 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?
My “No New Economy” Slides
| Peter Klein |
Here, for the curious, are my slides from this morning’s talk at the Law and Economics of Innovation conference, titled “Does the New Economy Need a New Economics?” (Short answer: no.) This will eventually morph into a paper so comments are most welcome (and thanks to those who have already helped). I’m looking forward to Susan Athey’s keynote later today.
More Economic Institutions of Strategy
| Nicolai Foss |
In his post of yesterday, Peter failed to mention that among the O&M bloggers not just Klein and Lien but also yours truly contributed to the Nickerson and Silverman 2009 edition of Advances in Strategic Management. Specifically, with Stieglitz (Nils — and with an “e”) I have written “Opportunities and New Business Models: Transaction Costs and Property Rights Perspectives on Entrepreneurship.” The paper can be downloaded from SSRN.
New Foss Sell-Out (?) Paper
| Nicolai Foss |
With Siegwart Lindenberg, Professor of Cognitive Sociology at the University of Groningen, I have written “Why Firms Work? A Goal-Framing Theory of the Firm.” Colleagues already refer to it as the “Foss sell-out paper” (but wait until I blog on that recent sell-out paper on entrepreneurship and the government by a certain O&M blogger . . . ).
Whatever that is, the paper starts from the familiar and long-standing debate between organizational economists and proponents of the knowledge-based view, and the many interesting recent attempts to merge key insights from TCE with ideas on learning and capabilities (Argyres, Nickerson, Mayer, Leiblein, Zenger, Hoettker, and others). The underlying idea is that additional explanatory leverage, for example, with respect to understanding the boundaries of the firm, will emerge from an integration of the two (clusters of) theories. (more…)
Economic Institutions of Strategy
| Peter Klein |
That’s the title of a forthcoming volume of Advances in Strategic Management edited by Jackson Nickerson and Brian Silverman. You’ll recognize the allusion to a certain classic book. Like that book, this volume maps out an ambitious agenda for new scholarship on institutions and organizations, particularly within the field of strategic management. The chapters provide critical reviews and syntheses of various strands of the strategy literature, intended to support and to challenge new and established scholars starting work in these areas. (They should make excellent readings, for example, for doctoral courses in strategy and the economics of organization.)
Lasse and I contributed a chapter, “Diversification, Industry Structure, and Firm Strategy: An Organizational Economics Perspective,” that you can download on SSRN. Here’s the abstract:
We review theory and evidence on corporate diversification, industry structure, and firm strategy from an organizational economics perspective. First, we examine the implications of transaction cost economics (TCE) for diversification decisions. TCE is essentially a theory about the costs of contracting, and TCE sheds light on the firm’s choice to diversify into a new industry rather than contract out any assets that are valuable in that industry. While TCE does not predict much about the specific industries into which a firm will diversify, it can be combined with other approaches, such as the resource-based and capabilities views, that describe which assets are useful where. We also discuss the transaction-cost rationale for unrelated diversification, which focuses on the potential efficiencies from exploiting internal capital markets. We review this argument as it emerged in the transaction cost literature in the 1970s and 1980s and, more recently, theoretical and empirical literature in industrial organization and corporate finance. We then discuss how diversification decisions, both related and unrelated, affect industry structure and industry evolution. Here, the stylized facts suggest that diversifying firms have a crucial impact on industry evolution because they are larger than average at entry, grow faster than average, and exit less often than the average firm. We conclude with thoughts on unresolved theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues and problems and provide suggestions for future research.
GM vs. TCE: Another “Block Upon Block”?
| Mike Sykuta |
Ronald Coase has spent the past two decades or more lamenting the lack of progress in economic theory. He bemoans the fact that economics, unlike its physical-science counterparts, fails to dispose of (or pursue new versions of) theories when facts show that prevailing theories are inaccurate or incomplete.
Among his many arguments, Coase has pointed to Williamson’s Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) as one that seems impervious to the facts. Part of Coase’s discontent with the TCE story rests on his observation that many firms sustain relationships characterized by high degrees of asset specificity using contractual means. While Ben Klein and others pointed to General Motors-Fisher Body as evidence to support the TCE story, Coase pointed to relations with auto frame manufacturer A.O. Smith at the same time that were not subsumed by vertical integration. This eventually led to the infamous GM-Fisher Body debate that seems for want of a real conclusion (see some of Peter’s previous comments on this here, here and here).
Well once again, General Motors seemingly plays the foil against TCE. Several weeks ago, GM announced plans to purchase Delphi Group’s global steering manufacturing operations. Delphi operated the steering unit solely for GM’s use. Delphi, in bankruptcy since October 2005, has been able to use GM’s dependence on Delphi’s operations to secure roughly $450 million in liquidity capital from GM to maintain its operations. Sounds like the classic hold-up problem, doesn’t it? But wait! (more…)
Antitrust and the Theory of the Firm
| Peter Klein |
Josh has a nice post at Truth on the Market on the place of antitrust research and practice within the legal academy. “[C]ontrary to the conventional wisdom I hear from the legal academy, it is an incredibly exciting time to practice, think about, and write about antitrust issues. . . . I suspect that right now is one of the most intellectually active antitrust eras in history.” Josh proposes several hypotheses on the increasingly popularity of antitrust analysis in law schools and within the law-and-economics movement.
Josh’s post got me thinking about the economic theory of the firm. The pioneers in this field — Coase, Williamson, Klein, Alchian, Demsetz, Teece, Masten — were actively interest in antitrust issues. The subtitle of Williamson’s Markets and Hierarchies (1975), after all, is “Analysis and Antitrust Implications.” In the more recent literature, however, antitrust doesn’t make much of an appearance. None of the leading scholars, such as Oliver Hart, Bengt Holmström, Jean Tirole, John Moore, Bob Gibbons, George Baker, Kevin Murphy, Tom Hubbard, or Steve Tadelis works juch on antitrust (please correct me if I’m wrong). Even giants like Foss, Klein, Langlois, and Lien are not active in this area.
One might respond that antitrust is an economic policy issue, not a firm-strategy issue, and note that transaction cost economics (TCE) has migrated from economics departments to business schools, where it joins the resource-based view (RBV) as a leading theoretical perspective on the the firm. Indeed, while the people mentioned above are economists, mostly teaching in economics departments, Williamsonian TCE has largely been supplanted by the Grossman-Hart-Moore model among mainstream economists, while it remains highly influential within the fields of strategic management, organization theory, and marketing.
This leaves us with two questions: (1) Why isn’t the property-rights or Grossman-Hart-Moore approach to the firm more influential in antitrust economics? (2) Why isn’t antitrust a bigger topic within strategic management (e.g., as part of a firm’s legal and political strategy)?
Value Creation in Middle-Market Buyouts
| Peter Klein |
Here’s a paper by John Chapman and me, “Value Creation in Middle-Market Buyouts: A Transaction-Level Analysis,” forthcoming in Douglas J. Cumming, ed., Companion to Private Equity (New York: Wiley, 2009). Get your copy today, while they’re hot. Abstract:
Is private equity an effective governance structure, or simply a means of transferring wealth from “Main Street” to “Wall Street”? How do buyouts affect target-company organization and strategy? How do deal characteristics such as size, industry, transaction complexity, buyer characteristics, holding period, and the like affect the performance of private-equity transactions? Are revenue improvements driven primarily by changes in employment and capital expenditures, or by changes in organization and strategy? Despite a healthy literature on buyouts, little is known about the details of private equity transactions, as most studies rely on publicly available data or confidential data from a single buyout firm. This paper uses a unique sample of 288 exited transactions over a 20-year period across 19 industries from 13 buyout firm firms, based on confidential data from detailed interviews with the general partners of several leading private-equity partnerships. While prior studies have focused on whole-company, going-private buyouts, our sample includes transactions with minority stakes, syndicate deals, and consolidating roll-up or add-on strategies, and we have detailed information on internal rates of return, leverage, equity stakes, and other deal characteristics. We find that the pursuit of ancillary consolidating acquisitions is the biggest driver of post-buyout revenue and profit growth, that solo deals and deals with controlling stakes outperform syndicated or “club” deals, that rates of return have declined over time as buyout markets have become more competitive, that mitigation of agency costs is critical for deal success, and more generally, that private equity can improve the performance even of sound businesses by providing access to resources, industry-specific expertise, capital for recombining assets (most often, consolidation in a fragmented industry), or recapitalization and ownership transition. Finally, our findings suggest the potential for further research of private equity at the transaction level.
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