nep-bec New Economics Papers
on Business Economics
Issue of 2022‒10‒03
eight papers chosen by
Vasileios Bougioukos
London South Bank University

  1. The Impact of Firm-level Covid Rescue Policies on Productivity Growth and Reallocation By Jozef Konings; Glenn Magerman; Dieter Van Esbroeck
  2. Connecting to power: political connections, innovation, and firm dynamics By Ufuk Akcigit; Salomé Baslandze; Francesca Lotti
  3. Japanese Firms' Markups and Firm-to-firm Transactions By NAKAMURA Tsuyoshi; OHASHI Hiroshi
  4. Board of Director Characteristics and Firm Performance for firms listed on Iraq Stock Exchange By Star, Miran
  5. Inflation Targeting and Developing countries’ Performance: Evidence from Firm-Level Data By Bao-We-Wal BAMBE; Jean Louis COMBES; Kabinet KABA; Alexandru MINEA
  6. Improving Patent Assignee-Firm Bridge with Web Search Results By Yuheng Ding; Karam Jo; Seula Kim
  7. Does the Supply Network Shape the Firm Size Distribution? The Japanese case By Corrado DI GUILMI; FUJIWARA Yoshi
  8. How Worker Productivity and Wages Grow with Tenure and Experience: The Firm Perspective By Andrew Caplin; Minjoon Lee; Søren Leth-Petersen; Johan Sæverud; Matthew D. Shapiro

  1. By: Jozef Konings; Glenn Magerman; Dieter Van Esbroeck
    Abstract: We analyze the impact of Covid-19 rescue policies on both firm-level and aggregate productivity growth and reallocation. Using administrative data on the universe of firms’ subsidies in Flanders, we estimate the causal impact of these subsidies on firm-level outcomes. Firms that received subsidies saw a 7% increase in productivity, compared to firms that applied for, but did not obtain subsidies. Furthermore, the propensity to exit the market was 43% lower for treated firms. Aggregate productivity growth, a share-weighted sum of firms’ productivity evolutions, amounted to 6% in 2020. While within-firm productivity growth was similar for both subsidized and non-subsidized firms, there is a reallocation of market shares from subsidized firms to non-subsidized firms. These results suggest that Covid rescue policies helped firms to sustain and preserve productivity, while not obstructing allocative efficiency gains to non-subsidized firms.
    Keywords: Productivity, productivity growth, aggregate productivity, allocative efficiency
    Date: 2022–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eca:wpaper:2013/349952&r=
  2. By: Ufuk Akcigit (University of Chicago); Salomé Baslandze (Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta); Francesca Lotti (Bank of Italy)
    Abstract: How do political connections affect firm dynamics, innovation, and creative destruction? We extend a Schumpeterian growth model with political connections that help firms ease their bureaucratic and regulatory burden. The model highlights how political connections influence an economy's business dynamism and innovation, and generate a number of implications guiding our empirical analysis. We construct a new large-scale dataset, for the period 1993-2014, on the universe of firms, workers, and politicians, supplemented by corporate financial statements, patent and election data, so as to define connected firms as those employing local politicians. We identify a leadership paradox: market leaders are much more likely to be politically connected, but much less likely to innovate. Political connections relate to a higher rate of survival, as well as growth in employment and revenues, but not in productivity. This result was also confirmed using the regression discontinuity design. At the aggregate level, gains from political connections do not offset losses stemming from lower reallocation and growth.
    Keywords: firm dynamics, innovation, political connections, creative destruction, productivity
    JEL: O3 O4 D7
    Date: 2022–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_1376_22&r=
  3. By: NAKAMURA Tsuyoshi; OHASHI Hiroshi
    Abstract: Markup, or the ratio of price to cost, depends on the firm's attributes and the market environment where the firm operates. This paper empirically studies the relationship between the markups of firms and their firm-to-firm transactional status. More specifically, we analyze the correlation between markups and the number and variety of the firm’s transactional partners. Based on a comprehensive panel dataset of Japanese firms derived from the Basic Survey of Japanese Business Structure and Activities, provided by METI, and the Firm Relation File of TSR (Tokyo Shoko Research) for 2007-2018, we find that a firm's markup level decreases as the number of suppliers (upstream transactional partners) increases, after controlling for firm attributes such as size and age, and industry-specific time effects. This empirical pattern is observed for both manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors. As for the firm’s number of customers (downstream transactional partners), the empirical results differ between manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors. We further examine the correlation between the number of transactional partners a firm has and the characteristics of those transactional partners.
    Date: 2022–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eti:dpaper:22083&r=
  4. By: Star, Miran
    Abstract: In this project, we evaluate the firm performance and the board, and what make the board and performance, relations in the stock firms, which is owned by more than owner, and we make our research based on Iraq, and we took the firm performance, of the Iraq firms, which are in, Iraq stock exchange, which we took the 2019, for the measuring the firms, performances, and for the board of director, we make three variables, which each having effect on the board, which were the first the size of the board, the second one is the CEO duality in the board, and the third one is the gender diversity, which is focus on the female ratio, and the board make the decision, which the result be the performance of the firm, which the board decision make impact on the performance, in a way which if the performance, doesn’t go well, the board will responsible for it. For that we try to find the relation between the effective factor of the board, and their effect on the performance.
    Keywords: board size, CEO duality, female member, firm performance
    JEL: G34 M41
    Date: 2022
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:114396&r=
  5. By: Bao-We-Wal BAMBE; Jean Louis COMBES; Kabinet KABA; Alexandru MINEA
    Keywords: , Inflation targeting , Manufacturing firm performance , Entropy balancing, Monetary policy credibility
    Date: 2022
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:leo:wpaper:2941&r=
  6. By: Yuheng Ding; Karam Jo; Seula Kim
    Abstract: This paper constructs a patent assignee-firm longitudinal bridge between U.S. patent assignees and firms using firm-level administrative data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We match granted patents applied between 1976 and 2016 to the U.S. firms recorded in the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) in the Census Bureau. Building on existing algorithms in the literature, we first use the assignee name, address (state and city), and year information to link the two datasets. We then introduce a novel search-aided algorithm that significantly improves the matching results by 7% and 2.9% at the patent and the assignee level, respectively. Overall, we are able to match 88.2% and 80.1% of all U.S. patents and assignees respectively. We contribute to the existing literature by 1) improving the match rates and quality with the web search-aided algorithm, and 2) providing the longest and longitudinally consistent crosswalk between patent assignees and LBD firms.
    Keywords: Innovation, Patent, Patent-firm Concordance, Linked Administrative Data
    Date: 2022–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cen:wpaper:22-31&r=
  7. By: Corrado DI GUILMI; FUJIWARA Yoshi
    Abstract: The paper presents an investigation on how the upward transmission of demand shocks in the Japanese supply network influences the growth rates of firms and, consequently, shapes their size distribution. Through an empirical analysis, analytical decomposition of the growth rates' volatility, and numerical simulations, we obtain several original results. We find that the Japanese supply network has a bow-tie structure in which firms located in the upstream layers display a larger volatility in their growth rates. As a result, the Gibrat's law breaks down for upstream firms, whereas downstream firms are more likely to be located in the power law tail of the size distribution. This pattern is determined by the amplification of demand shocks hitting downstream firms, and the magnitude of this amplification depends on the network structure and on the relative market power of downstream firms. Finally, we observe that in an almost perfectly hierarchical network, the power-law tail in firm size distribution disappears. The paper shows that aggregate demand shocks can affect the economy directly through the reduction in output for downstream firms and indirectly by shaping the firm size distribution.
    Date: 2022–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eti:dpaper:22082&r=
  8. By: Andrew Caplin (New York University and NBER); Minjoon Lee (Carleton University); Søren Leth-Petersen (University of Copenhagen); Johan Sæverud (University of Copenhagen); Matthew D. Shapiro (University of Michigan and NBER)
    Abstract: How worker productivity evolves with tenure and experience is central to economics, shaping, for example, life-cycle earnings and the losses from involuntary job separation. Yet, worker-level productivity is hard to identify from observational data. This paper introduces direct measurement of worker productivity in a firm survey designed to separate the role of on-the-job tenure from total experience in determining productivity growth. Several findings emerge concerning the initial period on the job. (1) On-the-job productivity growth exceeds wage growth, consistent with wages not being allocative period-by-period. (2) Previous experience is a substitute, but a far less than perfect one, for on-the-job tenure. (3) There is substantial heterogeneity across jobs in the extent to which previous experience substitutes for tenure. The survey makes use of administrative data to construct a representative sample of firms, check for selective non-response, validate survey measures with administrative measures, and calibrate parameters not measured in the survey.
    Keywords: Productivity, Wages, Tenure, Experience, Firm survey
    JEL: E24 J24 J30
    Date: 2022–09–11
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kud:kucebi:2211&r=

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