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This paper compares the environmental performance of family and nonfamily public corporations between 1998 and 2002, using a sample of 194 U.S. firms required to report their emissions. We found that family-controlled public firms protect their socioemotional wealth by having a better environmental performance than their nonfamily counterparts, particularly at the local level, and that for the nonfamily firms, stock ownership by the chief executive officer (CEO) has a negative environmental impact. We also found that the positive effect of family ownership on environmental performance persists independently of whether the CEO is a family member or serves both as CEO and board chair.

Two-year community colleges enroll nearly half of all first-time undergraduates in the United States, but to ambiguous effect: low persistence rates and the potential for diverting students from four-year institutions cast ambiguity over two-year colleges’ contributions to upward mobility. This paper develops a new instrumental variables approach to identifying causal effects along multiple treatment margins, and applies it to linked education and earnings registries to disentangle the net impacts of two-year college access into two competing causal margins: significant value added for two-year entrants who otherwise would not have attended college, but negative impacts on students diverted from immediate four-year entry.

In contrast to the prevailing interpretation of capabilities as collectives, this inductive study of product development in a leading design firm highlights the centrality of the myriad ordinary activities that may shape the evolution of capabilities. A detailed comparison of 90 diverse product development processes over a 15-year period shows, first, that mindful microactivities carried out by individuals in and around the organization and at all levels of the organizational hierarchy are central in shaping the content of the product development capability and its dynamic adaptation. Understanding organizational renewal and competitive advantage may hence require a partial shift in focus from capabilities as aggregate entities, to the practical realities of core organizational processes. Second, this more fine-grained perspective leads to a set of insights on how organizational renewal may be partially shaped by timely managerial interventions aimed at encoding successful experiments into higher-level organizational capabilities. Third, higher-level capabilities resulting from the conversion of heterogeneous experiences display higher process homogeneity and a permanent increase in performance, because of stabilization of managerial attention. My findings contribute to unveiling the concept of capabilities, extending prior research on dynamic capabilities and organizational renewal and providing a lens for research on the microfoundations of capability evolution and organizational advantage.

Based on a sample of Chinese listed firms from 1998 through 2002, this paper documents that listed firms prop up earnings by using abnormal related sales to their controlling owners. Such related sales propping is more prevalent among state-owned firms and in regions with weaker economic institutions. We also find that these abnormal related sales are not entirely accrual-based but can be cash-based as well, and they serve as a substitute rather than complement to accruals management for meeting earnings targets. Since these abnormal related sales can be cash-based, there is significant cash transfer via related lending from listed firms back to controlling owners after the propping. However, no cash transfer via related lending is found to be associated with accruals earnings management.

We investigate whether analyst behavior influenced banks' likelihood of winning underwriting mandates for a sample of 16,625 U.S. debt and equity offerings in 1993-2002. We control for the strength of the issuer's investment banking relationships with potential competitors for the mandate, prior lending relationships, and the endogeneity of analyst behavior and the bank's decision to provide analyst coverage. Although analyst behavior was influenced by economic incentives, we find no evidence that aggressive analyst behavior increased their bank's probability of winning an underwriting mandate. The main determinant of the lead-bank choice is the strength of prior underwriting and lending relationships.

Bundling is at the forefront of many policy debates as new technologies allow firms to implement more complex bundling arrangements. Realistic analyses of bundling—particularly between suppliers and retailers—require detailed data on both supply arrangements and consumer demand. We analyze firms' use of bundling as a vertical restraint (known as full-line forcing) using extensive supply and demand data from the video rental industry. Our model captures key details of the market that determine firms' contractual choices, and sheds light on the implications of these decisions. The empirical approach provides a model for how to analyze bundling when detailed data are available.

Although there is a large literature on executive turnover in Western firms, research on executive turnover in non-Western firms is limited, and this paper is the only one on China. A closer look at the executive turnover-performance link in China (one of the two major internal discipline mechanisms in corporate governance) is particularly relevant, since effective markets for corporate control are missing in China, the largest developing and transitional economy in the world. Furthermore, China is an interesting case because both types of agency problems are acute due to poorly defined property rights and weak investor protection, which result largely from its command economy legacy.

The empirical evidence documenting the association between a firm's level of corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) remains divided. This paper reinvestigates the CSP/CFP association using a more rigorous methodology whilst taking advantage of a superior measure of CSP. In contrast to the findings of much of the prior research, the market-based tests suggest a negative association between CSP and CFP, while the accounting tests indicate no association exists. We suggest that the negative market CSP/CFP relation should not be interpreted as CSP having no value. Rather, our results may suggest that leading CSP firms trade at a price premium (i.e. returns discount) relative to lagging CSP firms, thereby indicating that financial markets value CSP and are prepared to realise lower returns. For firms, this signals an ability to obtain a lower cost of equity capital when they proactively manage their CSP profiles.

Do low property taxes attract new home construction? This question is answered using a large shock to property tax burdens caused by an unusual school finance reform in the state of New Hampshire. The estimates suggest that, in most of the state, communities with a reduced tax burden experience a substantial increase in residential construction. In the area of the state near the region's primary urban center (Boston), however, the shock clears through a price adjustment—i.e., by capitalizing into property values. The differing responses are attributed to differing housing supply elasticities.

This timely and critically important work does what hostilities in the Middle East have made nearly impossible: it offers a measured, internal perspective on Palestinian politics, viewing emerging political patterns from the Palestinian point of view rather than through the prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Based on groundbreaking fieldwork, interviews with Palestinian leaders, and an extensive survey of Arabic-language writings and documents,Palestinian Politics after the Oslo Accordspresents the meaning of state building and self-reliance as Palestinians themselves have understood them in the years between 1993 and 2002. Nathan J. Brown focuses his work on five areas: legal development, constitution drafting, the Palestinian Legislative Council, civil society, and the effort to write a new curriculum. His book shows how Palestinians have understood efforts at building institutions as acts of resumption rather than creation-with activists and leaders seeing themselves as recovering from an interrupted past, Palestinians seeking to rejoin the Arab world by building their new institutions on Arab models, and many Palestinian reformers taking the Oslo Accords as an occasion to resume normal political life. Providing a clear and urgently needed vantage point on most of the issues of Palestinian reform and governance that have emerged in recent policy debates-issues such as corruption, constitutionalism, democracy, and rule of law-Brown's book helps to put Palestinian aspirations and accomplishments in their proper context within a long and complex history and within the larger Arab world.