Using detailed ownership and financial information available for a large sample of owner-managed private firms in three West European countries, this paper examines the relationship between manager's age and firm's performance. Tracking firms over time, we find that as a manager ages, the firm...

Using a large sample of private firms across Europe, we examine how the social context of owners affects firm strategy and performance. Drawing on embeddedness theory and the institutional logics perspective, we argue that embeddedness in a family, particularly the nuclear family, can strenghten...

This paper examines the relation between ownership, corporate form, and innovation for a cross-section of private and publicly traded innovating firms in the US and 15 European countries. A striking novel observation emerges from our analysis: while most innovating firms in the US are publicly...

Firms invest in scientific research to increase their chances of landing lucrative procurement contracts with the U.S. government. This is an important, but understudied channel through which the government encourages corporate research, particularly when other market mechanisms are...

This paper investigates the effect of financial development on the incentives to form business groups. We examine how this relation varies across exogenous industry conditions, legal environments, and firms' life cycle. Using a comprehensive dataset on group affiliation of European firms, we...

We study the impact of incentive pay, local development objectives and government constraints on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices, using new survey information together with panel data on U.S. universities for...

Academics, the media, and policymakers have all raised concerns about the implications of human workers being replaced by machines or software. Few have discussed the implications of the reverse: firms' ability to replace capital with workers. We show that this flexibility can help new firms...

This paper examines the relationship between strategic decision-making at the subsidiary level and organization structure. In many organizations, the interaction between central headquarters and subsidiaries is mediated by the presence of intermediate organizational units. Building on the...