Do Parents Matter? Effects of Lender Affiliation Through the Mortgage Boom and Bust

It is widely acknowledged that the 2007 mortgage crisis was preceded by a broad deterioration in underwriting diligence. This paper shows that this deterioration varied by the industry affiliation of mortgage lenders. Loans issued by homebuilders and stand-alone lenders were significantly less likely to default than loans issued by depository banks and affiliates of major financial institutions. I argue that homebuilders and stand-alone lenders had the least financial capacity to hold mortgages, and their resulting need to sell loans quickly on the secondary market forced them to issue safer loans. Tests of other explanations, including differences in information and incentives to avoid foreclosure externalities, receive little support. This study highlights a novel means by which firm boundaries influence firm adaptation to changing market conditions by defining the boundaries of the internal capital markets and hence the relative constraints of constituent units

Changes in Persistence of Performance Over Time

One of the central puzzles of strategy is the persistence of performance. We revisit a research tradition that lays out trends in persistence of performance, to create shared facts for strategy scholars to explain. We extend the time series from prior studies and apply recent methods for measuring performance persistence. We show that persistence of performance is not stable. Notably, our measure shows a decrease in persistence from the beginning of the sample to roughly 2000, followed by a marked increase thereafter. Our evidence suggests that the post-2000 increase in persistence is at least partly attributable to increases in industry concentration associated with the greater importance of software across industries in the late 1990s

The Contingent Effect of Management Practices

This paper investigates how the success of a management practice depends on the nature of the long-term relationship between the firm and its employees. A large US transportation company is in the process of fitting its trucks with an electronic on-board recorder (EOBR), which provide drivers with information on their driving performance. In this setting, a natural question is whether the optimal managerial practice consists of: (1) Letting each driver know his or her individual performance only; or (2) Also providing drivers with information about their ranking with respect to other drivers. The company is also in the first phase of a multi-year initiative to remake its internal operations. This first phase corresponds to an overhaul of the relational contract with its employees, focusing exclusively on changing values toward a greater emphasis on teamwork and empowerment. The main result of our randomized experiment is that (2) leads to better performance than (1) in a particular site if and only if the site has not yet received the values intervention, and worse performance if it has. The result is consistent with the presence of a conflict between competition-based managerial practices and a cooperation-based relational contract. More broadly, it highlights the role of intangible relational factors in determining the optimal set of managerial practices

Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance

We construct a measure of corporate purpose within a sample of US companies based on approximately 500,000 survey responses of worker perceptions about their employers. We find that this measure of purpose is not related to financial performance. However, high purpose firms come in two forms: firms that are characterized by high camaraderie between workers and firms that are characterized by high clarity from management. We document that firms exhibiting both high purpose and clarity have systematically higher future accounting and stock market performance, even after controlling for current performance, and that this relation is driven by the perceptions of middle management and professional staff rather than senior executives, hourly or commissioned workers. Taken together, these results suggest that firms with employees that maintain strong beliefs in the meaning of their work experience better performance

The Real Effects of Relational Contracts

Does the soft side of management matter? Many managers assert that firm culture is strongly correlated with productivity, but there are few robust tests of this assertion. In a set of field experiments, we study driver productivity within a large US logistics company that is arguably transitioning from one relational contract to another, while leaving formal practices and incentives unchanged. We find that sites under the new contract are associated with 1/8 percent higher productivity. Our findings suggest that relational contracts have a first-order effect on productivity and that they can be altered over time

Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance

We construct a measure of corporate purpose within a sample of US companies based on approximately 500,000 survey responses of worker perceptions about their employers. We find that this measure of purpose is not related to financial performance. However, high purpose firms come in two forms: firms that are characterized by high camaraderie between workers and firms that are characterized by high clarity from management. We document that firms exhibiting both high purpose and clarity have systematically higher future accounting and stock market performance, even after controlling for current performance, and that this relation is driven by the perceptions of middle management and professional staff rather than senior executives, hourly or commissioned workers. Taken together, these results suggest that firms with employees that maintain strong beliefs in the meaning of their work experience better performance

Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Global Retreat of Democracy: A Curated Discussion

To the surprise of many in the West, the fall of the USSR in 1991 did not lead to the adoption of liberal democratic government around the world and the much anticipated “end of history.” In fact, authoritarianism has made a comeback, and liberal democracy has been on the retreat for at least the last 15 years culminating in the unthinkable: the invasion of a democratic European country by an authoritarian regime. But why does authoritarianism continue to spread, not only as an alternative to liberal democracy, but also within many liberal democracies where authoritarian leaders continue to gain strength and popularity? In this curated piece, contributors discuss some of the potential contributions of management scholarship to understanding authoritarianism, as well as highlight a number of directions for management research in this area.publishedVersio

1:30 pm- 3:00 pm; Room: HOH-706 Pay Harmony: Peer Comparison and Executive Compensation

Do horizontal wage comparisons affect firm policies on executive pay? This paper explores that question using a 1992 SEC proxy disclosure rule that mandated increased disclosure of executive pay. We argue that this rule differentially increased wage comparisons within firms with geographically-dispersed managers—firms with the greatest information frictions prior to the rule change. We report three changes related to compensation after 1992 for division managers. First, within firms with dispersed managers, division manager pay co-moves more with peer pay and is less sensitive to individual performance. Second, pay disparity between managers located in different states decreases relative to that of co-located managers. Third, division productivity falls in dispersed firms, with the effect driven by managers at the low end of the wage distribution. Taken together, our findings suggest that principals account for horizontal peer comparison when designing executive wage contracts and that this comparison has productivit

Pay Harmony: Peer Comparison and Executive Compensation

Do horizontal wage comparisons affect firm policies on executive pay? This paper explores that question using a 1992 SEC proxy disclosure rule that mandated increased disclosure of executive pay. We argue that this rule differentially increased wage comparisons within firms with geographically-dispersed managers—firms with the greatest information frictions prior to the rule change. We report three changes related to compensation after 1992 for division managers. First, within firms with dispersed managers, division manager pay co-moves more with peer pay and is less sensitive to individual performance. Second, pay disparity between managers located in different states decreases relative to that of co-located managers. Third, division productivity falls in dispersed firms, with the effect driven by managers at the low end of the wage distribution. Taken together, our findings suggest that principals account for horizontal peer comparison when designing executive wage contracts and that this comparison has productivit