Competitive Grants and the Funding of Agricultural Research in the United States

Efforts to improve public agricultural research efficiency include calls to increase use of competitive grants. This paper empirically assesses different instruments the USDA uses to fund state-level research. Compared with other instruments, competitive grants focus more on basic research and are concentrated among fewer states. Model results suggest that top-ranked biology and agricultural science programs were strong determinants of states' shares of competitive grants. Other significant factors were agricultural sector size and number of agricultural scientists. USDA-funded state-level research focus did not change significantly because competitive grants comprised only 15% of these funds and other instruments counteracted their influence.     

On the Rationality of the Post-Announcement Drift

This paper demonstrates that a post-announcement earnings drift, which is often advanced as an example of market irrationality, can arise even if traders act rationally on their information. Specifically, we show that in the presence of share supply variations which are unrelated to information, there is a positive correlation between the unexpected component of current public signals and future price changes. Such a correlation arises from the fact that while prices reveal private information that cannot be found in public signals, non-information based trading distorts the information content of prices relative to the implications of both private and public information. Under these circumstances, markets may appear semi-strong inefficient and slow to respond to earnings announcements even though information is processed in a timely and efficient manner. Our findings correspond well with previously documented empirical evidence and suggest that the robustness of earnings-based anomalies may be rational outcomes of varying uncertain share supply.     

Venture capitalist monitoring: Evidence from governance structures

We examine the impact of venture capitalist (VC) involvement, quality and exit on corporate governance structures at the time of and subsequent to an initial public offering (IPO). Venture capital backed firms utilize governance structures with greater levels of monitoring at the time of an IPO compared to non-backed firms, but this difference begins to dissipate over time. While short-lived, IPOs backed by high quality VCs have greater overall monitoring levels than those IPOs backed by low quality VCs. IPOs backed by high quality VCs use significantly more equity-based compensation than their low quality counterparts. Finally, the exit of a VC materially alters the governance structure of firms. Measures of governance decline following the departure of a venture capital firm. Overall, the presence of a venture capitalist affects governance structures of firms both at the IPO and through the early years as public firms.     

The MNC as an externally embedded organization: An investigation of embeddedness overlap in local subsidiary networks

MNCs have been conceptualized as differentiated networks that, in turn, are embedded in external networks. Previous research has predominantly focused on the embeddedness of established subsidiaries into their local environment, omitting to shed light on the phenomenon of headquarters linkages to the local context which creates embeddedness overlap. We develop a model of why MNCs develop overlapping linkages to local subsidiary networks even if the subsidiaries have grown out of the initial start-up phase. Using detailed information on 168 European subsidiaries, we find that MNCs build and maintain more overlapping network ties when subsidiaries are high performers, hold important resources, operate in turbulent environments, and are closely connected to multinational actors as opposed to purely domestic firms.