Both M&A and innovation are instruments for growth and competitive advantage.Therefore they are fundamental to each firm’s competitive strategy. Usually, both instrumentshave been studied separately, but much less in conjunction. This is unfortunate as bothprocesses - the process of innovation...

This paper investigates the relationship between a CEO’s social network, firm identity, andfirm performance. There are two competing theories that predict contradictory outcomes.Following social network theory, one would expect a positive relation between social networksand firm performance,...

While several plots of the aggregate age distribution suggest that rm age is expo-finentially distributed, we find some departures from the exponential benchmark. At thelower tail, we find that very young establishments are more numerous than expected,but they face high exit hazards. At the...

The past decades witnessed a broad trend towards flatter organizations with lesshierarchical layers. A reduction of the number of management levels in a corporationcan have both positive and negative effects on firm performance with the neteffect being theoretically unclear ex ante. The present...

Recent research has led to the empirical regularity that rm growth rate distributionsare heavy tailed. This nding implies that a few rms experience spectaculargrowth rates and decline, but that most rms have marginal growth rates. The literatureon high growth rms shows that high growth rms are...

Inter-rm competition has received much attention in the theoreticalliterature, but recent empirical work suggests that the growth rates of ri-val rms are uncorrelated, and that rm growth can be taken as an essen-tially independent process. We begin by investigating the correlations of thegrowth...

Since the mid-1990s, major Japanese banks have sold off a significant portion of their holdings of corporate equity. Using information on the identity of Japanese firms' top 10 shareholders, this paper explores the process of banks' equity disposal. There is some evidence that, after FY2001,...

In this paper we will look at job creation and destruction in firms. We will answer the questionif it is the large companies that create jobs, while the smaller companies are contributingmuch less. Or is it the young companies that create jobs? And who destroys the most jobs?In the crisis...

This paper explores the role of country asymmetries for trade and industrial policies withheterogeneous firms. Our analysis delivers a number of novel results. First, trade policies,infrastructure policies and industrial policies which improve the business conditions in onecountry have negative...

We use plant output and input prices to decompose the profit margin into four parts:productivity, demand shocks, mark-ups and input costs. We find that each of these marketfundamentals are important in explaining plant exit. We then use variation across sectors intariff changes after the...