Does Contract Complexity Limit Opportunities? Vertical Organization and Flexibility

The vertical organization of production entails a range of make-or-buy decisions of intermediate goods that are influenced by the difficulty of writing contracts with a potential supplier. When contracting causes high transaction costs, a firm can decide to vertically integrate the production of the intermediate product. Contract complexity can be measured by decomposing the range of inputs into inputs that are traded on an exchange (low contract complexity), inputs for which reference prices exist (low to medium contract complexity) and other, often relationship-specific inputs (medium to high contract complexity). This inaugural lecture addresses the impact of contract complexity on the growth opportunities of a firm. The present value of growth opportunities are embedded in the market value of a firm, which is a multiple of the firm’ stock price. Examining the relation between the growth opportunities as part of the market value and contract complexity, we find that contract complexity has a negative impact on

A Model for Evaluating Pharmaceutical R&D Investment Projects under Technical and Economic Uncertainties

This study sets up a compound option approach for evaluating pharmaceutical R&D investment projects in the presence of technical and economic uncertainties. Technical uncertainty is modeled as a Poisson jump that allows for failure and thus abandonment of the drug development. Economic uncertainty is modeled as a standard di¤usion process which incorporates both up-and downward shocks. Practical application of this method is emphasized through a case analysis. We show that both uncertainties have a positive impact on the R&D option value. Moreover, from the sensitivity analysis, we nd that the sensitivity of the option with respect to economic uncertainty and market introduction cost decreases when technical uncertainty increases

Defensive Disclosure under Antitrust Enforcement

We formulate a simple model of optimal defensive disclosure by a monopolist facing uncertain antitrust enforcement and test its implications using unique data on defensive disclosures and patents by IBM during 1955-1989. Our results indicate that stronger antitrust enforcement leads to more defensive disclosure, that quality inventions are disclosed defensively, and that defensive disclosure served as an alternative but less successful mechanism to patenting at IBM in appropriating returns from R&D

The Option Value of Advanced R&D

Existing tools for making R&D investment decisions cannot properly capture the option value in R&D. Since many new products are identified as failures during the R&D stages, the possibility of refraining from market introduction may add a significant value to the NPV of the R&D project. This paper presents new theoretical insight by developing a stochastic jump amplitude model in a real setting. The option value of the proposed model depends on the expected number of jumps and the expected size of the jumps in a particular business. The model is verified with empirical knowledge of current research in the field of multimedia at Philips Corporate Research. This way, the gap between real option theory and the practice of decision making with respect to investments in R&D is diminished

Unionization Structure, Licensing and Innovation

Taking technological differences between firms as given, we show that the technologically advanced firm has a stronger incentive for technology licensing under a decentralized unionization structure than with centralized wage setting. Furthermore, We show that, in presence of licensing, the incentive for innovation may also be stronger under decentralized unions. Unions have a clear preference for centralization only if productivity improvements are relatively small

Horizontal Multinational Firms, Vertical Multinational Firms and Domestic Investment

We build a dynamic general equilibrium model with 2 countries, horizontal and vertical multinational activity and endogenous domestic and foreign investment. It is found that horizontal multinational activity always leads to a complementary relationship between domestic and foreign investment. Vertical multinational activity, in contrast, leads to either a substitutional or complementary relationship between domestic and foreign investment, depending on the firms' technologies. We test the theoretical implications with a panel of U.S. multinationals and find empirical support

Productivity Growth and the Speed of Convergence of Domestic Firms

We investigate productivity convergence of domestic firms in a transition economy, Ro- mania. In estimating total factor productivity we allow for varying returns to scale and control for both the endogeneity of the productivity shock and the omitted price variable bias linked to heterogeneous firms' market power. Consistently with our priors, we find that without controlling for the omitted price variable bias absolute convergence estimates are biased upwards. In terms of conditional convergence, we find that the speed of convergence across firms depends mainly on technology transfers from the frontier and, less markedly, by a number of regional and industrial characteristics such as the distance to the capital region, the minimum efficient scale and the absorptive capacity

Testing for Marginal Spillovers from Foreign Direct Investment

We develop a simple test to assess whether horizontal spillover effects from multinational to domestic firms are endogenous to the market structure generated by the entry of the same multinationals. In particular, we analyze the performance of a panel of 10,650 domestic and multinational firms operating in Romania in the period 1995-2001. Controlling for the simultaneity bias in productivity estimates through semi-parametric techniques, we find that changes in domestic firms’ TFP are positively related to the first foreign investment in a specific industry and region, but get significantly weaker and become negative as the number of multinationals that enter in the considered industry/region increases. We can thus recover evidence of changing marginal effects in domestic firms’ TFP, the sign of which depends on a specific threshold in the presence of foreign firms

Domestic Plant Productivity and Incremental Spillovers from Foreign Direct Investment

We develop a simple test to assess whether horizontal spillover effects from multinational to domestic firms are endogenous to the market structure generated by the incremental entry of the same multinationals. In particular, we analyze the performance of a panel of 10,650 firms operating in Romania in the period 1995-2001. Controlling for the simultaneity bias in productivity estimates through semi-parametric techniques, we find that changes in domestic firms’ TFP are positively related to the first foreign investment in a specific industry and region, but get significantly weaker and become negative as the number of multinationals that enter in the considered industry/region crosses a specific threshold. These changing marginal effects can explain the lack of horizontal spillovers arising in traditional model designs. We also find these effects to vary between manufacturing and service, suggesting as a possible explanation a strategic change in technology transfer decisions by multinational firms as the market structure

What do We Know about Social Entrepreneurship: An Analysis of Empirical Research

Despite the growing attention to social entrepreneurship as a scholarly field of research, it is still in a stage of infancy. Research in the past two decades has been primarily dedicated to establishing a conceptual foundation, which has resulted in a considerable stream of conceptual papers. Empirical articles have gradually appeared since the turn of the century. Although they are still outnumbered by conceptual articles, empirical articles are of considerable significance for the evolution of social entrepreneurship as a field of scientific inquiry. The purpose of this paper is to gauge the current state of empirical research in the field by reviewing 31 empirical research studies on social entrepreneurship, classifying them along four dimensions and summarising research findings for each of these dimensions. To serve this purpose in a meaningful fashion requires discriminating between different perspectives on social entrepreneurship. Hence, four different schools of thought are presented, and the articles in our sample are classified accordingly