Competition and Long–run Productivity Growth in the UK and US Tobacco Industries, 1879–1939

The UK and US tobacco industries provide a particularly clean place to examine the impact of changes in market structure on firm conduct and productivity in a rapidly innovating industry. Although each industry had roughly equal access to new manufacturing technologies, the industries were monopolized at different times. The US lost an early productivity lead after the formation of the Tobacco Trust in 1890, but regained it after the UK industry merged to monopoly in 1902 and the Trust was broken up in 1911. Supplementary evidence suggests that technological innovation and consolidation of production were more rapid during competitive periods.     

Nationalism in Winter Sports Judging and Its Lessons for Organizational Decision Making

This paper exploits nationalistic biases in Olympic winter sports judging to study the problem of designing a decision-making process that uses the input of potentially biased agents. Judges score athletes from their own countries higher than other judges do, and they appear to vary their biases strategically in response to the stakes, the scrutiny given the event, and the degree of subjectivity of the performance aspect being scored. Ski jumping judges display a taste for fairness in that they compensate for the nationalistic biases of other panel members, while figure skating judges appear to engage in vote trading and bloc judging. Career concerns create incentives for judges: biased judges are less likely to be chosen to judge the Olympics in ski jumping but more likely in figure skating; this is consistent with judges being chosen centrally in ski jumping and by national federations in figure skating. The sports truncate extreme scores to different degrees; both ski jumping and, especially, figure skating are shown to truncate too aggressively. Extreme truncation not only discards information, but may also make the vote trading in figure skating easier to implement. These findings have implications for both the current proposals for reforming the judging of figure skating and for designing decision making in organizations more generally.     

When should firms share credit with employees? Evidence from anonymously managed mutual funds

We study the choice between named and anonymous mutual fund managers. We argue that fund families weigh the benefits of naming managers against the cost associated with their increased future bargaining power. Named managers receive more media mentions, have greater inflows, and suffer less return diversion due to within family cross-subsidization, but departures of named managers reduce net flows. Naming managers became less common between 1993 and 2004. This was especially true in the asset classes and cities most affected by the hedge fund boom, which increased outside opportunities for, and the cost of retaining, successful named managers.