The Effect of Family Involvement on Innovation Outcomes: The Moderating Role of Board Social Capital

Innovation is an essential and yet puzzling part of family firms’ strategic focus. While family firms are generally characterized as conservative regarding their research and development (R&D) activities, researchers have recently argued that family firms can still achieve innovation-based competitive advantages. Seeking to understand the link between family influence and the outcomes of innovation, we suggest that it is necessary not only to observe the depth of family involvement, but also to differentiate between technological inventions and market innovations. We further posit that the board members’ social capital constitutes an important contingency for this link. We, therefore, investigate the relationship between family involvement and two different outcomes: the number of the firm’s inventions and the market relevance of innovations. Our analysis of S&P 500 firms comprises 1.85 million patents and manual evaluations of 1774 product announcements. The results of our estimations suggest that family involvement is negatively related to the number of inventions and positively related to the market relevance of innovations. They further show that internal and external board social capital moderate the relationship between family involvement and the number of inventions. This study adds to the discussion about family firm innovation by using socioemotional wealth to explain heterogeneity in innovation patterns and revealing that relational resources derived from board social capital are crucial boundary conditions for families’ influence on technological inventions. Taken together, it works toward a more holistic view of innovation in family-influenced firms.     

Estimating the distribution of welfare effects using quantiles

This paper proposes a framework to model welfare effects that are associated with a price change in a population of heterogeneous consumers. The framework is similar to that of Hausman and Newey (Econometrica, 1995, 63, 1445–1476), but allows for more general forms of heterogeneity. Individual demands are characterized by a general model that is nonparametric in the regressors, as well as monotonic in unobserved heterogeneity, allowing us to identify the distribution of welfare effects. We first argue why a decision maker should care about this distribution. Then we establish constructive identification, propose a sample counterparts estimator, and analyze its large‐sample properties. Finally, we apply all concepts to measuring the heterogeneous effect of a change of gasoline price using US consumer data and find very substantial differences in individual effects across quantiles.     

Access to Finance and Exports – Comparable Evidence for Small and Medium Enterprises from Industry and Services in 25 European Countries

Open Economies Review - This study uses strictly comparable data for small and medium sized enterprises from industry or services in 25 European countries to test for links between credit...     

Enhancing food security through diet quality: The role of nonfarm work in rural India

India has achieved food security at the macro level. However, at the micro level, the country still struggles with extensive problems of food nutrition insecurity. In this paper, we assess the impact of nonfarm income and nonfarm work status (casual and full-time nonfarm work) of operator, spouses, and couples on the diet quality of smallholder households in India. We find that nonfarm income decreases the likelihood of farming household being in the poor-diet quality group by 31% and the medium-diet quality group by 3%. Full-time nonfarm work by operators and spouses decreases the likelihood of farming households being in the poor-diet quality group by 3% and 9%, respectively. Finally, national programs like public food distribution programs increase the probability of rural farming households in the poor-diet quality group. Findings from this study underscore the importance of nonfarm income and full-time nonfarm work in improving diet quality of rural Indian households.     

Drivers,barriers and success factors of academic spin-offs: a systematic literature review

Management Review Quarterly - The considerable economic contribution of academic spin-offs (ASOs) has drawn numerous scholars’ attention to explore the factors that influence their...     

Economic Retirement Age and Lifelong Learning: A Theoretical Model With Heterogeneous Labor,Biased Technical Change and International Sourcing

The employability of an aging population in a world of continuous and biased technical change is top of the political agenda. Due to endogenous human capital depreciation the effective retirement age is often below statutory retirement age resulting in permanent non‐employability of older workers. We analyze this phenomenon in a putty‐putty human capital vintage model and focus on education and the speed of human capital depreciation. Introducing a two‐stage education system with initial schooling and lifelong learning, not even lifelong learning turns out to be capable of aligning economic and statutory retirement. However, well‐designed education programs will keep more workers in highly productive activities at the end of their working life, and hence will substitute for simple social transfers, or for an early switch towards very low paid jobs.     

Kleptocracy and tax evasion under resource abundance

Evidence has shown that petroleum wealth is associated with less transparency and at the same time less tax collection. In this paper, we find that the two issues are linked through the citizens’ tax evasion behavior. We develop a model to explain this link and conduct extensive empirical tests of its validity. The explanation is that officials tradeoff greater transparency to improve tax compliance against less transparency to increase gains from corruption. Oil windfalls diminish tax revenue needs, causing officials to optimize on less transparency. Seeing this, citizens optimize on a lower level of tax compliance. At equilibrium, both decline with a positive oil shock. We also study the alternative channel in which tax compliance responds to enforcement. Transparency is found to be the more robust channel. Ignoring citizens’ strategic behavior would lead to predicting suboptimal investment in state capacity for tax enforcement. Using giant oil discoveries data combined with oil price data, we develop a dynamic composite instrument and estimate the model with a dynamic panel system generalized method of moments. We find robust support for our explanation and the model's deep structure for 130+ countries and the 1980–2010 period.     

Polit-ökonomische Aspekte des Berichts zur Lage der Verbraucher:innen

Wirtschaftsdienst - Der Sachverständigenrat für Verbraucherfragen hat erstmals ein breit angelegtes Gutachten zur Lage der Verbraucher:innen in Deutschland vorgelegt. Gert G. Wagner,...