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"Firm theory"
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Opening the gates : the Lip affair, 1968-1981
\"How the occupation of a watch factory became one of the iconic labour struggles after May 1968 In the Summer of 1973, workers occupied the Lip watch and clock factory, sparking a national affair. The Lip occupation and self-management experience captured the imagination of the Left in France and internationally, as a living example of the spirit of May '68. In Opening the Gates, Donald Reid chronicles the history of this struggle. Beginning with the early stirrings of worker radicalism in 1968, Reid's meticulously researched narrative details the nationally publicised conflict of 1973, the second bankruptcy and occupation of 1976 and the conversion of Lip into a group of cooperatives operating into the 1980s. Reid explores the arguments that that animated Lip: between the labour bureaucracy and the rank-and-file; between the two main progressive trade unions, the CGT and the CFDT; between the established worker institions at Lip (CGT, CFDT, and the CE/works council) and the more militant, less structured organizations like the Action Committee; and lastly, between male workers and an increasingly-politicized female workforce at Lip, who gradually developed a parallel feminist struggle both inside and outside the factory\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Dynamic Olley-Pakes productivity decomposition with entry and exit
We propose an extension of the Olley and Pokes (1996) productivity decomposition that accounts for the contributions of surviving, entering, and exiting firms to aggregate productivity changes. We argue that the other decompositions that break down aggregate productivity changes into similar components introduce some biases in the measurement of the contributions of entry and exit. We apply our proposed decomposition to Slovenian manufacturing data and contrast our results with those of other decompositions. We find that, over a five-year period, the measurement bias associated with entry and exit is substantial, accounting for up to 10 percentage points of aggregate productivity growth.
Journal Article
Digital Platforms and the Nature of the Firm
Digital platforms turn traditional approaches of the firm, which relied on the wage relation to explain the major difference between firm and market, upside down and underline the advantages of coordination through organization over coordination through market. This study aims to propose a definition of the firm able to integrate, besides the integrated firm, also hybrid forms such as networks of subcontractor/subcontracting firms as well as atypical forms such as digital platforms. By reactivating the firm-boundary problem, this article suggests putting valorization by labor at the heart of the firm's decisions concerning integration. It suggests therefore a general definition of the firm as a techno-institutional center of capital valorization, provided that firms make profits by means of the appropriation of labor incorporated into their (productive, structural, intellectual) capital through institutional arrangements. By stressing the relation of production between the owners of the means of production and the direct producers, the approach of the firm supported here should allow to cover the different existing models of the firm, from the classical firm to hybrid models, around which the boundary debate has revolved, to digital platforms.
Journal Article
Innovation, Firm Dynamics, and International Trade
We present a general equilibrium model of the response of firms’ decisions to operate, innovate, and engage in international trade to a change in the marginal cost of international trade. We find that, although a change in trade costs can have a substantial impact on heterogeneous firms’ exit, export, and process innovation decisions, the impact of changes in these decisions on welfare is largely offset by the response of product innovation. Our results suggest that microeconomic evidence on firms’ responses to changes in international trade costs may not be informative about the implications of changes in these trade costs for aggregate welfare.
Journal Article
Incomplete Contracts and the Theory of the Firm: What Have We Learned over the Past 25 Years?
Sanford Grossman and Oliver Hart used the theory of incomplete contracts to develop answers to the question “What is a firm, and what determines its boundaries?” in their path-breaking paper on “The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration” (Journal of Political Economy, 1986, vol. 94, no. 4). Perhaps the central issue is that economic actors are only boundedly rational and cannot anticipate all possible contingencies. It might well be that certain states of nature or actions cannot be verified by third parties after they arise, like certain qualities of a good to be traded in the future, and thus cannot be written into an enforceable contract. When contracts are incomplete, and consequently not all uses of an asset can be specified in advance, any contract negotiated in advance must leave some discretion over the use of the assets; and the “owner” of the firm is the party to whom the residual rights of control have been allocated at the contracting stage. The optimal allocation of property rights—or governance structure—is one that minimizes efficiency losses. This produces a theory of ownership and vertical integration as well as a theory of the firm. First we spell out Grossman and Hart's argument using a simple numerical example. Then we show how the incomplete contracts approach can be used to analyze the firms' internal organization; the firms' financial decisions; the costs and benefits from privatization; and the organization of international trade between inter- and intrafirm trade. We discuss several criticisms of the incomplete contracts/property rights methodology and review recent developments of the incomplete contracts approach.
Journal Article
CEO Ambivalence and Responses to Strategic Issues
We examine how executives' ambivalent evaluation of a strategic issue relates to organizational actions taken in response. Ambivalence occurs when a decision maker evaluates an issue as simultaneously positive and negative, a state that has received scant attention in organizational research. We integrate findings in social psychology with the behavioral theory of the firm to suggest how executives' ambivalence prompts wider and more vigorous search for action responses and enables broader participation. Data from a two-wave survey of 104 German CEOs who evaluated the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 and reported their organizations' responses show that organizations whose CEOs evaluated the event as both positive and negative were more likely to take action when both evaluations were also strongly held. The reported actions were also of greater scope, novelty, and riskiness. The study contributes to research on organizational decision making by theorizing the role of top executives' ambivalence and by providing a first systematic test of how ambivalence affects responses to strategic issues.
Journal Article
A review of servitization theoretical foundations
Purpose: This study seeks to analyse how the servitization topic has been addressed through different theoretical approaches. More specifically, the aim is to answer two key questions: What theoretical approaches have been used to study the phenomenon of servitization? What specific aspects of the servitization process have been analysed through each theoretical approach? Design/methodology/approach: This paper adopts a systematic literature review. The first step involves a descriptive analysis, which is then followed by a thematic one. Findings: The results show that the topic of servitization has been analysed according to the main boundary of the firm theories (Resource-based view, Game theory, and Transaction cost economics) and to organizational boundaries (Contingency theory and Resource dependence theory), among others. From the perspective of these theoretical frameworks, the following topics have received the most scholarly attention: Performance, Capabilities, Supply Chain Management, Business Model, Strategy, and Sustainability. Originality/value: Observations are made on the relevance that diverse theories have on the development of research into servitization. The most suitable theoretical lenses are recommended for future research.
Journal Article
Managing Disruption Risk: The Interplay Between Operations and Insurance
Disruptive events that halt production can have severe business consequences if not appropriately managed. Business interruption (BI) insurance offers firms a financial mechanism for managing their exposure to disruption risk. Firms can also avail of operational measures to manage the risk. In this paper, we explore the relationship between BI insurance and operational measures. We model a manufacturing firm that can purchase BI insurance, invest in inventory, and avail of emergency sourcing. Allowing the insurance premium to depend on the firm's insurance and operational decisions, we characterize the optimal insurance deductible and coverage limit as well as the optimal inventory level. We prove that insurance and operational measures are not always substitutes, and we establish conditions under which they can be complements; that is, insurance can increase the marginal value of inventory and can increase the overall value of emergency sourcing. We also find that the value of insurance is higher for those firms less able to absorb financially significant disruptions. As disruptions become longer but rarer, the value of emergency sourcing increases, and the value of inventory and the value of insurance increase before eventually decreasing.
This paper was accepted by Martin Lariviere, operations management.
Journal Article
Should Investors Bet on the Jockey or the Horse? Evidence from the Evolution of Firms from Early Business Plans to Public Companies
We study how firm characteristics evolve from early business plan to initial public offering (IPO) to public company for 50 venture capital (VC)-financed companies. Firm business lines remain remarkably stable while management turnover is substantial. Management turnover is positively related to alienable asset formation. We obtain similar results using all 2004 IPOs, suggesting that our main results are not specific to VC-backed firms or the time period. The results suggest that, at the margin, investors in start-ups should place more weight on the business (\"the horse\") than on the management team (\"the jockey\"). The results also inform theories of the firm.
Journal Article
Endogenous Information Flows and the Clustering of Announcements
We consider the strategic timing of information releases in a dynamic disclosure model Because investors don't know whether or when the firm is informed, the firm will not necessarily disclose immediately. We show that bad market news can trigger the immediate release of information by firms. Conversely, good market news slows the release of information by firms. Thus, our model generates clustering of negative announcements. Surprisingly, this result holds only when firms can preemptively disclose their own information prior to the arrival of external information. These results have implications for conditional variance and skewness of stock returns.
Journal Article