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on Business Economics |
| By: | Marco Grazzi; Chiara Piccardo; Cecilia Vergari |
| Abstract: | This work investigates the relationship between proxies of innovation activities, such as patents and trademarks, and firm performance in terms of revenues, growth and profitability. By resorting to the virtual universe of Italian manufacturing firms this work provides a rather complete picture of the Intellectual Property (IP) strategies pursued by Italian firms, in terms of patents and trademarks, and we study whether the two instruments for protecting IP exhibit complementarity or substitutability. In addition, and to our knowledge novel, we propose a measure of concordance (or proximity) between the patents and trademarks owned by the same firm and we then investigate whether such concordance exert any effect on performance. |
| Keywords: | Trademarks, Patents, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Complementarity, Concordance, Technological proximity, firm performance, firm growth, firm performance, firm growth |
| Date: | 2019–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:wpaper:201904&r=all |
| By: | Joonkyu Choi; Nathan Goldschlag; John Haltiwanger; J. Daniel Kim |
| Abstract: | We explore the role of founding teams in accounting for the post-entry dynamics of startups. While the entrepreneurship literature has largely focused on business founders, we broaden this view by considering founding teams, which include both the founders and the initial employees in the first year of operations. We investigate the idea that the success of a startup may derive from the organizational capital that is created at firm formation and is inalienable from the founding team itself. To test this hypothesis, we exploit premature deaths to identify the causal impact of losing a founding team member on startup performance. We find that the exogenous separation of a founding team member due to premature death has a persistently large, negative, and statistically significant impact on post-entry size, survival, and productivity of startups. While we find that the loss of a key founding team member (e.g. founders) has an especially large adverse effect, the loss of a non-key founding team member still has a significant adverse effect, lending support to our inclusive definition of founding teams. Furthermore, we find that the effects are particularly strong for small founding teams but are not driven by activity in small business-intensive or High Tech industries. |
| Date: | 2019–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cen:wpaper:19-32&r=all |
| By: | Dalton, Patricio (Tilburg University, Center For Economic Research); Pamuk, H. (Tilburg University, Center For Economic Research); Ramrattan, R.; van Soest, Daan (Tilburg University, Center For Economic Research); Uras, Burak (Tilburg University, Center For Economic Research) |
| Abstract: | Electronic payment instruments have the potential to spur the transparency of business transactions and thereby reduce information frictions. We design a field experiment to understand whether e-payments facilitate the financial inclusion of SMEs in developing world and to study adoption barriers. We encourage a random sample of Kenyan merchants to adopt a new mobile-money payment instrument and find that the decision to adopt is hampered by the combination of information, know-how and seemingly small transaction costs barriers. In addition, we nd that business owners who are more averse to transparency are more reluctant to adopt. Sixteen months after the intervention, we observe that treated firms have better access to finance in the form of mobile loans. The impact on financial access is more pronounced for smaller establishments, which also experience a considerable reduction in sales volatility. We conclude that e-payments can help un-collateralized firms become transparent and get financially integrated. |
| Keywords: | SME Finance; Transparency; payment technologies; Lipa Na M-Pesa |
| JEL: | D22 G00 G21 O33 |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tiu:tiucen:98cf0741-8e78-4bba-a270-4b1ee857cd39&r=all |
| By: | Brown, David P. (University of Alberta, Department of Economics); Eckert, Andrew (University of Alberta, Department of Economics) |
| Abstract: | Using data from Alberta's wholesale electricity market, we demonstrate the empirical challenges that can arise when employing empirical methodologies to characterize a firm's unilateral profit-maximizing offer curve. We illustrate that such residual demand analyses can result in non-monotonic, downward sloping, optimal best response offer curves violating restrictions imposed on bidding behaviour. We show that this arises because of the highly non-linear nature of residual demand functions firms can face in practice. We find that firms could have achieved the vast majority of expected profits by employing an offer curve that represents a monotonically smoothed version of the often non-monotonic optimal offer curves. Our findings shine light onto empirical challenges associated with commonly employed equilibrium models to analyze firm behaviour in restructured electricity markets. Further, our analysis illustrates that the failure to account for these empirical challenges may lead researchers to incorrect conclusions regarding observed firm behaviour. These findings stress the importance of accounting for regulatory and practical constraints firms face when modeling bidding behaviour in these multi-unit, uniform priced, procurement auctions. |
| Keywords: | Electricity; Market Power; Regulation |
| JEL: | D43 L40 L51 L94 Q48 |
| Date: | 2019–10–24 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:albaec:2019_015&r=all |