Where has all the skewness gone? The decline in high-growth (young) firms in the U.S.

The pace of business dynamism and entrepreneurship in the U.S. has declined over recent decades. We show that the character of that decline changed around 2000. Since 2000 the decline in dynamism and entrepreneurship has been accompanied by a decline in high-growth young firms. Prior research has shown that the sustained contribution of business startups to job creation stems from a relatively small fraction of high-growth young firms. The presence of these high-growth young firms contributes to a highly (positively) skewed firm growth rate distribution. In 1999, a firm at the 90th percentile of the employment growth rate distribution grew about 31 percent faster than the median firm. Moreover, the 90−50 differential was 16 percent larger than the 50−10 differential reflecting the positive skewness of the employment growth rate distribution. We show that the shape of the firm employment growth distribution changes substantially in the post-2000 period. By 2007, the 90−50 differential was only 4 percent larger than the 50−10, and it continued to exhibit a trend decline through 2011. The overall decline reflects a sharp drop in the 90th percentile of the growth rate distribution accounted for by the declining share of young firms and the declining propensity for young firms to be high-growth firms.     

Relationship between city size and firm productivity – A new interpretation using the Chinese experience

This paper contributes to the literature on the relationship between city size and firm productivity by focusing on agglomeration, selection (market competition), and sorting (presence of firms with diverse productivity) effects using Chinese firm-level data for 1998–2013. Contrary to the existing literature, our parametric regression estimates from nearly two million firms show that when the selection effect is controlled, productivity advantage in big cities is reversed. This outcome is explained through a quantile regression showing the existence of left-sided sorting (inefficient firms sort themselves to larger cities) in big cities which is not captured in existing empirical literature. We further find that (1) left-sided sorting is stronger in exporters than non-exporters; (2) is also generated mainly in enterprises with high asset-liability ratios; and (3) selection has a positive effect on firm productivity, suggesting that market competition is key in an explanation of the rapid growth of big cities in China.     

公司治理与企业家精神

传统公司治理理论强调对于企业控制权的控制,而淡化了企业作为企业家精神租金创造的意义。本文通过对公司治理与企业家精神的内在逻辑分析,提出公司治理实质上包含着朝向企业家精神的保健机制与激励机制,其共同作用影响企业家精神的发挥从而决定了公司治理的绩效。在理论分析的基础上,本文利用上市家族、国有企业的数据对理论假设进行了实证检验。结果证明,就家族企业而言,激励机制对企业家精神具有显著的正向促进作用,保健机制则表现为不作为或失灵;就国有企业而言,激励机制对企业家精神无显著影响,保健机制则对企业家精神具有较为显著的“倒U型”作用。     

Attracting responsible employees: Green production as labor market screening

Corporate social responsibility can improve firms’ ability to recruit highly motivated employees. This can secure socially responsible firms’ survival even in a highly competitive environment. We show that if both socially responsible (green) and non-responsible (brown) firms exist in equilibrium, workers with high moral motivation, who shirk less than others, will self-select into the green firms. If unobservable effort is sufficiently important for firm productivity, this can drive every brown firm out of business—even in the case where many workers have no moral motivation whatsoever.     

专业服务企业治理模式的实证研究——以美国2003-2010年前100强会计师事务所为例

合伙制和公司制是专业服务企业常见的治理模式。本文根据相关理论归纳分析,认为企业服务业务、资本需求、经营风险、组织规模、员工异质性等五个方面是影响专业服务企业选择公司制还是合伙制作为治理模式的主要因素,并以此建立假说,利用美国2003-2010年前100强会计事务所的数据进行了实证检验。结果表明,除服务业务的标准化程度与企业治理模式间的关系尚不确定有待进一步研究外,资本需求越大,经营风险越高;组织规模越大,员工异质性越高,企业越趋向于采用公司制的治理模式。     

Does labor diversity promote entrepreneurship?

We find evidence that workforce educational diversity promotes entrepreneurial behavior of employees as well as the formation of new firms, whereas diversity in demographics hinders transitions to self-employment. Ethnic diversity favors entrepreneurship in financial and business services.     

Employee opportunism and redundancy in firms

Firms who share specialized information or client connections with their employees expose themselves to the risk of opportunism, in which their workers leave the firm and go into business for themselves. Legal and contractual solutions to the problem of employee opportunism are not always viable. Instead, firms may organize themselves so as to discourage opportunism. We study an organizational scheme called internal redundancy: the practice of assigning employees to overlapping tasks so that they are less likely to possess sole access to trade secrets or customers, and therefore, less likely to profit if they leave the firm.     

Firms,kinship networks,and economic growth in the Kyrgyz Republic

While kinship ties support private sector development, they can also lead to economic inefficiencies. The paper examines the impact of kinship networks on firm performance and growth based on our original survey of 1000 firm owners in the Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan. We obtained detailed information on respondents’ business networks, resources they both receive from (in-networks) and provide to their kin and other contacts (out-networks) and their firm's performance. Our results indicate that in-networks raise profitability, out-networks reduce it, and these two forms of network usage are positively, but far from perfectly, correlated. We also show that kin-reliant firms grow slower than firms with access to non-kin assistance but faster than firms that do not have access to any business networks at all. We find evidence that one mechanism of slower growth is lower levels of reinvestment. We conclude that accounting for in- and out-networks helps to resolve the ambiguous message from the broader empirical literature regarding the effect of kin networks on firm performance: the two forms of network use are positively correlated, most likely due to generalized reciprocity within kin networks, yet have opposite effects.     

The Role of Expectation on Job Search and the Firm Size Effect on Wages

We formulate dynamic games which give a rationale to the firm size–wage effect that the sheer firm size increases wages. We postulate that past wages of large firms are known to new employees, while those of small firms are not. Large firms can credibly induce workers to expect high future wages and reduce turnover, while small firms have no choice but to be myopic and pay low wages. The equilibrium wage differential obtains under the same worker characteristics and production function. We provide empirical evidence that workers' expectations depend on firm size and affect wages as predicted by our model.     

When Do Employees Leave Their Job for Entrepreneurship?*

Existing firms are argued to be an important source of new entrepreneurs. Yet, relatively little is known about the characteristics of firms that breed new entrepreneurs. We use a large linked employee–employer dataset to trace and characterize the types of firms which generate new entrepreneurs in Finland. We find that such transitions are rare and that smaller firms spawn new entrepreneurs more frequently than larger firms. We also find that firms' R&D intensity and, to a lesser extent, their productivity are negatively related to the probability that employees transit into entrepreneurship. These results are robust to controlling for a number of employee and employer attributes.     

Does government paternalistic care promote entrepreneurship in China? Evidence from the China Employer-Employee Survey

ABSTRACT

This article examines whether government paternalistic care exerts positive effects on entrepreneurship in China, and the channels through which paternalistic care affects entrepreneurship, using data from the 2015 baseline of the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES). The data suggests that over 70% of manufacturing firms received at least one type of government paternalistic care, though the distributions are different depending on the firm’s size, ownership, industry, firm and entrepreneur’s age. The empirical analysis indicates that government paternalistic care negatively affects entrepreneurship by diminishing innovation capability. Human capital and imported intermediate goods should be the driving forces for a firm’s development, but government paternalistic care has a counterproductive effect on those two factors, thereby impeding entrepreneurship. The results show that those good intentions have gone awry. The government should gradually terminate its paternalistic policies for firms, and firms need to promote their own solid innovation capability.

Abbreviations: CEES: China Employer-Employee Survey SOE: State-owned enterprise     

Should continued family firms face lower taxes than other estates?

Taxes on estates and inheritances may induce heirs to discontinue family firms. Because firm dissolution incurs transaction costs, a preferential tax treatment of transferred family businesses seems to be desirable from a macroeconomic viewpoint. The support of dynastic succession, however, entails also a cost on the economy if firm continuation by less able heirs prevents entry into entrepreneurship. Here, we investigate analytically and quantitatively the trade-off between transaction costs saved and creative destruction prevented. We find that a unique general equilibrium exists at which, depending on the institutional setup, low-ability heirs either abandon (Type 1) or continue (Type 2) a family business. A calibration of the model with German data suggests that preferential tax treatment of family firms has severe negative consequences on macroeconomic performance if it causes a threshold crossing from Type 1 to Type 2 equilibrium. It also reveals that the descendants of less able entrepreneurs who were caused by continuation-friendly tax policy to keep a family business always lose relative to their status in an economy without such a policy.     

企业特征、高管薪酬结构与企业绩效

利用2005—2010年我国沪深两市A股非金融保险行业1654家上市公司的高管年度薪酬数据,结合企业特征,对不同类型企业的高管薪酬结构与企业绩效的关系进行了实证研究,细化锦标赛理论和行为理论在不同类型企业中可能形成的差异化实施效应。结果显示:我国不同类型的企业都比较适宜采用锦标赛理论制定高管薪酬激励政策,竞争性的高管薪酬结构对于提升企业绩效具有正面作用,均等化高管薪酬结构不利于企业的价值创造;相对于民营企业、小规模企业、低成长企业而言,我国国有企业、大规模企业、高成长企业更宜采用锦标赛理论设计企业高管薪酬结构。因此我国不宜对非金融保险行业国有企业的高管薪酬进行过度均等化的管制,否则会负面影响企业绩效提升和企业价值创造。     

Business Creation and the Stock Market

We claim that the stock market encourages business creation, innovation, and growth by allowing the recycling of "informed capital". Due to incentive and information problems, start-ups face larger costs of going public than mature firms. Sustaining a tight relationship with a monitor (bank, venture capitalist) allows them to finance their operations without going public until profitability prospects are clearer or incentive problems are less severe. However, the earlier young firms go public, the quicker monitors' informed capital is redirected towards new start-ups. Hence, when informed capital is in limited supply, factors that lower the costs for start-ups to go public encourage business creation. Technological spill-overs associated with business creation and thick market externalities in the young firms segment of the stock market provide prima facie cases for encouraging young firms to go public.     

Entrepreneurship,institutions and skills in low-income countries

This paper develops a model of costly firm creation in an economy with weak institutions, costly business environment as well as skill gaps where one of the equilibrium outcomes is a low-productivity trap. The paper tests the implications of the model using a cross-sectional dataset including about 100 countries. Both theoretical and empirical results suggest that to move the economy into a productive equilibrium, complementarity matters: reforms to improve the business environment tend to be more effective in creating productive firms when accompanied by narrowing skill gaps. Similarly, more conducive business regulations amplify the positive impact on firm creation of better education and reduced skill mismatches. To escape a low-productivity trap, policymakers should thus create a pro-business framework and a well-functioning education system.     

Does the Effectiveness of Employment Incentive Programs Vary by Firm Size?

This article examines the impact of national employment incentive programs on employment growth of individual firms in the original fifteen member states of the European Union (EU-15). We investigate whether this impact differs among firms of different size classes, and whether the effectiveness of employment incentive programs depends on the business cycle. We find that expenditures on employment incentives have a positive impact on employment growth for firms of all sizes. However, this impact is significantly reduced for smaller firms, suggesting that employment incentive programs are less effective for small firms. We also find that the employment impact of incentive programs is stronger during recessionary periods, but only for firms without any employees (i.e., own-account workers).     

Regulating away competition: the effect of regulation on entrepreneurship and employment

Many scholars have worried that regulation deters entrepreneurship because it increases the cost of entry, reduces innovation in the regulated industry, and benefits large firms because they can overcome the costs of complying with regulations more easily than smaller firms. Using novel data on the extent of US federal regulations by industry and data on firm births and employment from the Statistics of US Businesses, we run fixed effects regressions to show that more-regulated industries experienced fewer new firm births and slower employment growth in the period 1998–2011. Large firms may even successfully lobby government officials to increase regulations to raise their smaller rivals’ costs. We also find that regulations inhibit employment growth in all firms and that large firms are less likely to exit a heavily regulated industry than small firms.     

无边界职业生涯视角下高校创业教育对员工创造力的滞后影响——一个双重中介模型

创业作为经济增长和社会进步的新引擎已经成为国际共识，各国政府高度重视高校学生创业教育。创业教育以培养创业精神为核心，除能提升大学生创业率外，还能塑造大学生的职业观念，满足其成为创新型人才的素质要求。以接受过高校创业教育并已就职的90后新生代员工为研究对象，探讨高校创业教育如何影响员工无边界职业生涯态度和工作场所创造力。基于266份有效数据的实证研究表明，在高校所接受的创业教育能够显著提升员工工作场所创造力，无边界职业生涯态度的两个维度无边界心智模式和组织移动偏好在两者间均起中介作用，且无边界心智模式的中介作用显著大于组织移动偏好。研究结论进一步验证了高校创业教育的滞后效应，可为高校创业教育提供有益的启示。     

家族创始人职业经历与企业风险承担*

基于创始人自身特征的异质性,本文研究家族创始人职业经历与企业风险承担的关系。研究发现,相对于家族创始人具有公共部门职业经历的企业,创始人具有企业部门职业经历的企业风险承担水平更高。进一步地,在产品市场竞争激烈的行业,家族创始人的企业部门职业经历与企业风险承担水平的正相关关系更强。研究表明,具有企业部门职业经历的家族创始人更偏好风险,其所掌控企业的风险承担水平也更高。本文发展了基于代理理论和控制权理论的家族企业风险承担研究,论证了家族创始人职业经历特征对企业风险承担的重要作用。同时,本文研究结论有助于投资者识别企业风险。     

Does it pay firms to register for taxes? The impact of formality on firm profitability

This paper estimates the impact of registering for taxes on firm profits in Bolivia, the country with the highest levels of informality in Latin America. A new survey of micro and small firms enables us to control for a rich set of measures of owner ability and business motivations that can affect both profits and the decision to formalize. We identify the impact of tax registration on business profitability using the distance of a firm from the tax office where registration occurs, conditional on the distance to the city center, as an instrument for registration. Proximity to the tax office provides firms with more information about registration, but is argued to not directly affect profits. We find tax registration leads to significantly higher profits for the firms that the instrument affects. However, we also find some evidence of heterogeneous effects of tax formality on profits. Tax registration appears to increase profits for the mid-sized firms in our sample, but to lower profits for both the marginal smaller and larger firms, in contrast to the standard view that formality increases profits. We show that owners of large firms who have managed to stay informal are of higher entrepreneurial ability than formal firm owners, in contrast to the standard view (correct among smaller firms) that informal firm owners are low ability.