We study the microstructure of the U.S. housing market using a novel data set comprising housing search and bargaining behavior for millions of interactions between sellers and buyers. We first establish a number of stylized facts, the most prominent being a nearly 50--50 split between houses that sold below final listing price and those that sold above final listing price. Second, we compare observed behavior with predictions from a large theoretical housing literature.
In stark contrast with liquid asset returns, I find that commercial real estate idiosyncratic return means and variances do not scale with the holding period, even after accounting for all cash flow relevant events. This puzzling phenomenon survives controlling for vintage effects, systematic risk heterogeneity, and a host of other explanations. To explain the findings, I derive an equilibrium search-based asset-pricing model which, when calibrated, provides an excellent fit to transactions data.
While prior research highlights the importance of codifying alliance experience to achieve alliance success, it is unclear whether codification is equally useful in the different phases of an alliance. Based on a sample of 192 technology firms that report on over 3,400 strategic alliances, we find that in the partner selection and termination phases, reliance on codified knowledge is useful. However, in the partner management phase, reliance on codified knowledge is less beneficial and can be even negatively related to performance. Our findings have implications for the tension between flexibility and efficiency and the relationship between structure and performance.
Much is known about the importance of learning and some of the distinct learning processes that organizations use (e.g., trial-and-error learning, vicarious learning, experimental learning, and improvisational learning). Yet surprisingly little is known about whether these processes combine over time in ordered ways, because most research on learning explores one particular process. Using theory elaboration and theory-building methods and data on the accumulated country entries of entrepreneurial firms, we address this gap. Our core contribution is an emergent theoretical framework that develops the concept of learning sequences. We find that learning sequences exist and are influenced by initial conditions.
While much research indicates that organizational processes are learned from experiences, surprisingly little is known about what is actually learned. Using a novel method to measure explicit learning, we track the learned content of six technology-based ventures from three diverse countries as they internationalize. The emergent theoretical framework indicates that firms learn heuristics. These heuristics have a common structure centered on opportunity capture and are learned in a specific developmental order. This results in a deliberately small, yet increasingly strategic, portfolio of heuristics. Broadly, we contribute to the psychological foundations of strategy by highlighting the rationality of heuristics as strategy, capability creation as the cognitive transition from novice to expert heuristics, and simplification cycling as a critical dynamic capability for sustaining competitive advantage.
We recently introduced a research program on how firms can effectively capture fleeting opportunities using heuristics. Heuristics, we advocate, are the essence of strategy, especially in unpredictable markets where opportunities are often numerous, fast moving, and uncertain. Our emphasis on heuristics invites comparison with prominent research programs in cognitive psychology. We address this opportunity by comparing our “simple rules” heuristics approach with “heuristics-and-biases” and “fast-and-frugal” heuristics research. Collectively, the three approaches offer a rich understanding of heuristics.
Using a survey of new firms in Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, I explore how an entrepreneur’s social networks affect the amount paid in bribes to government officials. Lower levels of bribe payments are associated with ownership by a former manager of a state-owned enterprise (SOE), with being a spin-off from a SOE, and with trade association membership.
Academics, politicians, and journalists are often highly critical of U.S. firms for holding too much cash. Cash holdings are stockpiled free-cash flow and incur substantial opportunity costs from the perspectives of economics. However, behavioral theory highlights the benefits of cash holdings as fungible slack resources facilitating adaptive advantages.
Research on strategic momentum considers how experience with innovation affects firms’ subsequent innovativeness. Traditionally the momentum literature has emphasized arguments for an accelerating effect of innovation experience, but recent critiques and contrasting empirical results suggest ambiguity regarding how experience with innovation affects subsequent innovative activity.
This study uses learning theory to show how knowledge domains affect product extension decisions and how these product decisions change as firms age. Faced with the choice of new product-markets, a firm might decide to introduce a similar product, by leveraging existing firm knowledge, or to experiment with a less familiar product, which requires new knowledge.
We examine the global equity supply chains of U.S. multinationals to explore how tax and nontax country characteristics affect whether firms use foreign holding companies and where they locate them. We find that U.S. multinationals supply equity from headquarters to their foreign operating companies through foreign holding companies located in countries that lightly tax equity distributions.
Shareholder value creation from hedge fund activism occurs primarily by influencing takeover outcomes for targeted firms. Controlling for selection decisions, activist interventions substantially increase the probability of a takeover offer.
The increasingly large role played by financial intermediaries, such as venture capitalists and angels, in nurturing entrepreneurial firms and in promoting product market innovation has led to great research interest in the area of entrepreneurial finance and innovation.
Recognizing that initial public offerings (IPOs) represent the debut of private firms on the public stage, this study investigates how pre-IPO customer and competitor orientations (CCOs) affect IPO outcomes.
We find evidence of systematic optimism and pessimism among credit analysts, comparing contemporaneous ratings of the same firm across rating agencies. These differences in perspectives carry through to debt prices and negatively predict future changes in credit spreads, consistent with mispricing. Moreover, the pricing effects are the largest among firms that are the most opaque, likely exacerbating financing constraints.
In this paper, we provide a theoretical and empirical framework that allows us to synthesize and assess the burgeoning literature on CEO overconfidence. We also provide novel empirical evidence that overconfidence matters for corporate investment decisions in a framework that explicitly addresses the endogeneity of firms' financing constraints.
The disproportionate emphasis on firm closures during crises, such as the recent pandemic, may overlook potential variations in firm exit rates across markets. Ignoring that variation likely hinders accurate insights though, as are required by both practitioners and policy makers. To investigate variable firm closure rates across markets, this study proposes a firm closure model that integrates the unique roles of the market structure (number of firms and firm type), firm responsiveness, pandemic intensity, and their interactions.
We use unique data on employee decisions in the employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs) of U.S. public firms to measure the influence of networks on investment decisions. Comparing only employees within a firm during the same election window and controlling for a metro area fixed effect, we find that the local choices of coworkers to participate in the firm’s ESPP exert a significant influence on employees’ own decisions to participate.
Millions of employees face work schedules and wages that change frequently as firms try to match labor to demand. Here, we use personnel records from the retail industry to examine whether workers’ income precariousness impacts firm performance.
We find that Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) see through transitory shocks to credit risk that stem from transitory shocks to equity prices, while market-based measures of credit risk do not. For a given stock return, CRAs are significantly less likely to downgrade firms with transitory shocks than those with permanent shocks. However, credit default swap spreads and model-implied default probabilities do not distinguish between such shocks.