Amundsen versus Scott: are growth paths related to firm performance?
Coad, A., Daunfeldt, SO. & Halvarsson, D. (2022). Amundsen versus Scott: are growth paths related to firm performance?. Small Business Economics 59, 593–610.
Coad, A., Daunfeldt, SO. & Halvarsson, D. (2022). Amundsen versus Scott: are growth paths related to firm performance?. Small Business Economics 59, 593–610.
In the race to the South Pole, Roald Amundsen’s expedition covered an equal distance each day, irrespective of weather conditions, while Scott’s pace was erratic. Amundsen won the race and returned without loss of life, while Scott and his men died. In the context of firm growth, the Amundsen hypothesis suggests that smoother growth paths are associated with better performance in subsequent periods. We develop a new method to investigate how firms’ sales growth deviates from their long-run average growth path. Our baseline results suggest that growth path volatility is associated with higher growth of sales and profits, but also with higher exit rates. However, this result is driven by firms with negative growth rates. For positive-growth firms, volatility is negatively associated with both sales growth and survival, providing nuanced support for the Amundsen hypothesis.
The article can be accessed here.
Coad, A., Daunfeldt, SO. & Halvarsson, D.
2022
Small Business Economics 59, 593–610 (2022).
2023
Applied Economics Letters, 1-5.
In this note we study how the share of workers in a corporation located in a high gender wage gap country impacts the wage gap in their home country operations. Our findings support the hypothesis that firms with strong intra-firm linkages to a high gender wage gap country also display a relatively large gender wage gap at home.
2023
Rati Working Paper Series.
In this paper, we build upon a monopsony framework, suggested by Card et. al. 2016, which links firm level productivity and rent-sharing to wage inequality. Specifically, our research questions address i) to which extent labor market concentration across firms (within different types of locally situated industries) affects variation in wages among workers within these firms and industries, and ii) how this variation in turn spills over into economy-wide inequality (measured at the level of local labor markets). Using linked employer-employee full population data for Sweden, and an AKM modelling framework to separate between worker- and firm-level heterogeneity, our results suggest that higher firm-level fixed effects (a measure of rent-sharing) is associated with lower labor market employer concentration, something which affects average wage income among firms accordingly. Addressing wage income inequality by applying our model to different segments of the local labor market income distribution, we find that reduced average employer concentration in larger cities accounts for almost all variation in the (positive) link between city size-and wage inequality, except for the largest metropolises where it captures around 30-50 percent of variation depending on the income segment that we focus on.
2022
Ratio Working Paper.
Using geo-coded full-population grid-level data for the three largest metropolitan areas in Sweden, 1993-2016, this paper i) estimates the level and pace of ethnic segregation, ii) examines possible tipping points in this development, and iii) gauges the importance of several mitigating or exacerbating factors (such as the mix of housing area tenure type, different types of amenities, and crime). We use OLS and 2SLS to estimate outcomes at two different geographic levels; 250 x 250 square meter grids and SAMS areas (roughly equivalent to US census tracts), respectively. On average, we find that for every 1 percentage point increase in immigration, native growth is reduced by around -0.3 percentage points. Crime levels exacerbate developments and factors such as housing area tenure-type mix and access to various amenities slows it down, but only marginally so. Using repeated and single random sampling for cross-validation, and the twin common methodological approaches as suggested in the literature, we estimate possible tipping points in these segregation developments. In contrast to most other studies in the literature, none of our potential tipping points are however statistically significant when probing their relevance in explaining factual population developments, suggesting a rather more continuous – albeit steeply so – segregation process rather than a structural brake. In terms of tipping point methodology, our main findings are that fixed-point estimation is less robust than R-square maximization for small geographical units, and that the former consistently selects for lower tipping-point candidates than the latter.