Members of management boards as well as supervisory boards often attract public criticism when they are simultaneously active in several other boards. We use a panel data set of the biggest German corporations for the period from 1996-2006 to estimate the impact of multiple board memberships of...

We study the impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic on short- and medium-term economic performance in Sweden. The pandemic was one of the severest and deadliest pandemics in human history, but it has hitherto received only scant attention in the economic literature – despite representing an...

Arguments for increasing gender diversity on boards of directors range from ensuring equal opportunity to improving firm performance, but the empirical results are mixed and often negative. Current research does not justify gender quotas on grounds of economic efficiency. Furthermore, in most...

This empirical paper documents the relationship between the composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance (productivity and profitability) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany using newly...

Determining what factors influence firm performance constitutes an essential issue in both the management and the family firm research fields. This article, building on the resource-based view perspective, develops a mediation model that involves a unique intervening mechanism, namely,...

Theory indicates that internally-differentiated professional partnerships can promote matching between heterogeneous consumers and professionals, particularly when consumers have imperfect information or markets have barriers to referrals between firms. We test this in obstetrics markets,...

We examine the effects of venture capital (VC) investment on the performance (measured by return on assets, return on equity, and Tobin's Q) and growth (measured by growth of total sales and total number of employees) of entrepreneurial firms in the People's Republic of China (PRC) after an...

We study how a bank credit crunch—a dramatic worsening of firm and consumer access to bank credit, such as the one observed over the Great Recession—translates into job losses in U.S. manufacturing industries. To identify the impact of the recent credit crunch, we rely on differences in the...

We examine investors’ mutual fund selection ability in China. Using actively managed equity mutual funds between 2005 and 2011, we find that Chinese investors generally have no mutual fund selection ability, a result contrary to the smart money effect in the United States. We show that mutual...

This paper examines the effect of corporate diversification on firm value during periods of economic downturns. Analysis of diversified firms’ valuation during recessionary periods reveals a significant increase in relative value of diversified firms. The observed improvement in the relative...