Does interdependency affect firm and industry profitability? an empirical test

Strategy researchers have argued that heterogeneity in firms' practices and profitability within and across industries may derive from industry‐level differences in the extent of interdependencies among firms' activities. Theoretical models have clarified how and why differences in the extent of the interdependencies faced by firms across industries may affect the distributions of firm profits, but the specific predictions from these models have not been empirically tested. In this paper, we present what we believe is the first large scale empirical analysis linking differences in the extent of interdependencies across industries to differences in the distribution of firm profits within and across those industries. We use survey data to measure interdependencies systematically across a wide number of industries, thus addressing the primary obstacle to incorporating interdependencies in larger scale empirical work, and find evidence consistent with the theoretical predictions: average profitability is highest in industries with moderate levels of interdependency; the dispersion of profits among firms is higher in industries with more extensive interdependencies; and industries with more extensive interdependencies have a more positively skewed performance distribution. We find that the effect of interdependencies on average industry profitability is similar in scale to the effect of patent protection and industry growth rates, placing interdependency squarely among the strategy field's central concepts. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Public–private partnerships: Task interdependence and contractibility

We examine the proper scope of public–private partnerships in the context of a project consisting of two tasks, building and operation of a facility. We investigate the optimal arrangement regarding bundling versus unbundling and private ownership versus public ownership. Like Bennett and Iossa (2006), we assume that the innovative activity in the building stage has impacts on, among other things, the subsequent operational cost. We relax the nature of task interdependence and study different contractual frameworks. The general insight is that given limitations in contractibility, contrary to common sense, complementarity between tasks favors unbundling over bundling.     

Managing academic innovation in Taiwan: Towards a ‘scientific-economic’ framework

Since the passage of the Science and Technology Basic Law in 1999, Taiwanese universities have taken a more “scientific-economic” approach to protect and commercialize their research. This research mainly examines innovation activities such as patenting, licensing, and incubated startups in the context of Taiwanese higher education institutions (HEIs). The “scientific-economic” framework used to analyze the strategic aspects influencing these academic innovations includes (1) intellectual property managerial capabilities, (2) the strength of external industrial partnerships, (3) the university entrepreneurial orientation, and (4) government research policy. Four hypotheses were developed. Data were collected via a questionnaire with all 122 HEIs in Taiwan surveyed.The research reveals that the aspects of intellectual property managerial capability, HEI-industry partnerships, and academic entrepreneurial orientation are useful to distinguish the university's innovation performance on patent grants, licensing incomes, and firm incubation. Also, government support on research plays a moderating role in academic innovation. Managerial and policy implications for managing innovation effectively in universities were drawn.     

Flexible Estimation of Copulas: An Application to the US Housing Crisis

Zimmer (‘The role of copulas in the housing crisis’, Review of Economics and Statistics 2012; 94 : 607–620) provides an interesting case study of the pitfalls of using parametric copulas to understand the US housing crisis in the latter part of 2000s. The original study by Zimmer (2012) employs a finite‐mixture copula to illustrate that the symmetry of the Gaussian copula may not be tenable, especially for US housing price data during the time period from 1975:Q2 to 2009:Q1. We undertake a replication of his study in a wide sense. First, we replicate the study by incorporating revised data and then extending the dataset to include the most recent data. Second, we implement a nonparametric copula estimator recently proposed by Racine (‘Mixed data kernel copulas’, Empirical Economics forthcoming) to the parametrically filtered data used in Zimmer (2012). Our replication finds that the application of the nonparametric copula to the same and extended filtered data provides an alternative flexible specification for copulas. However, the overall cautionary message of the flexible‐form copula espoused in Zimmer (2012) remains. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shrinkage Estimation Strategies in Generalised Ridge Regression Models: Low/High-Dimension Regime

In this study, we suggest pretest and shrinkage methods based on the generalised ridge regression estimation that is suitable for both multicollinear and high-dimensional problems. We review and develop theoretical results for some of the shrinkage estimators. The relative performance of the shrinkage estimators to some penalty methods is compared and assessed by both simulation and real-data analysis. We show that the suggested methods can be accounted as good competitors to regularisation techniques, by means of a mean squared error of estimation and prediction error. A thorough comparison of pretest and shrinkage estimators based on the maximum likelihood method to the penalty methods. In this paper, we extend the comparison outlined in his work using the least squares method for the generalised ridge regression.     

Employee well-being attribution and job change intentions: The moderating effect of task idiosyncratic deals

We developed and tested a research model in which employee well-being human resource (HR) attribution differentially influences the intention to change jobs across organizations (i.e., external job change intention) versus that within the same organization (i.e., internal job change intention). Furthermore, we posited that task idiosyncratic deals (I-deals) moderated the relationships between employee well-being HR attribution and external and internal job change intentions. Results indicated that employee well-being HR attribution was negatively related to external job change intention, but positively related to internal job change intention. Further, task I-deals significantly moderated the relationships between employee well-being HR attribution and external and internal job change intention. Specifically, employee well-being HR attribution played a less important role in reducing external job change intention when task I-deals were high rather than low. On the other hand, high task I-deals significantly strengthened the positive relationship between employee well-being HR attribution and internal job change intention. Our study extends the careers literature by differentiating the impact of employee well-being HR attribution on job change intentions within an organization compared with that across organizations and the important role of supervisors in enhancing or mitigating these effects.     

Impact of oil price changes on Turkey’s exports

Substantial decline in oil prices observed since the second half of 2014 has brought forward discussions on the impact of oil prices on the external balance. This decline is expected to shift real income from oil exporter countries to oil importer countries. In this context, we study the effect of change in oil prices on Turkey’s exports taking into account the fact that Turkey’s export to oil exporting countries has approximately one-third share in total exports, while export to oil importing countries has a share of two-thirds. At the first step, we analyse the effect of oil prices on economic growth of trade partners of Turkey, where countries are grouped according to their net oil export position. We find that the effect of oil prices on different country groups’ growth is asymmetric. In the second stage, for two groups of countries, we estimate growth-export elasticity through Turkey’s export demand function. Finally, we calculate the net effect of oil prices on exports considering different income effects caused by oil price change on each country groups. Results indicate that the net effect of oil prices on the exports is limited given the current export shares.     

The asymmetric relationship between executive earnings management and compensation: a panel threshold regression approach

Prior research shows that chief executive officers (CEOs) are rewarded for their earnings management. We re-examine this issue using a panel threshold regression approach, which allows the effect of earnings management on the CEO compensation to change across the level of earnings management and CEO compensation. Our results show that the effect of CEOs’ discretionary accounting choices on their compensation is not homogeneous across various degrees of earnings management and compensation. In particular, for firms with moderate (inordinate) levels of earnings management and CEO compensation, earnings management is rewarded (penalized).