Working Paper No. 303: Subsidy Entrepreneurs
Gustafsson, A, Gustavsson Tingvall, P, Halvarsson, D. (2017). Subsidy Entrepreneurs. Ratio Working Paper No. 303. Stockholm: Ratio.
Gustafsson, A, Gustavsson Tingvall, P, Halvarsson, D. (2017). Subsidy Entrepreneurs. Ratio Working Paper No. 303. Stockholm: Ratio.
In this paper, we study the selection process and incentives of firms that apply for and eventually receive one or multiple governmental grants intended to stimulate innovation and growth in supported firms. The analysis departs from a rent-seeking model of heterogeneous entrepreneurs who are free to allocate their effort between production and rent-seeking. In equilibrium, highly productive entrepreneurs choose not to enter the rent-seeking contest altogether, and moderately productive entrepreneurs allocate a share of their effort both to rent-seeking and production, whereas low-productivity entrepreneurs are incentivized to allocate most, if not all, of their effort to seeking grants and can thus be called subsidy entrepreneurs. These firms also have a higher probability of receiving grants. Using detailed data over all grants administered by the three largest grant distributing agencies in Sweden, the empirical analysis suggests that supported firms tend to have relatively low productivity, higher wages, and a larger share of workers with higher education than do non-supported firms. These characteristics become more pronounced as we move from single to multiple supported firms, thus supporting the notion of subsidy entrepreneurs.
Gustafsson, A, Gustavsson Tingvall, P, Halvarsson, D
2017
Ratio Working Paper
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
Small Business Economics 59, 593–610 (2022).
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.