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
Springer.
Most previous studies on the employment effects of government R&D grants targeting SMEs are characterized by data-, measurement-, and selection problems, making it difficult to construct a relevant control group of firms that did not receive an R&D grant. We investigate the effects on employment and firm-level demand for high human capital workers of two Swedish programs targeted toward growth-oriented SMEs using Coarsened Exact Matching. Our most striking result is the absence of any statistically significant effects. We find no robust evidence that the targeted R&D grant programs had any positive and statistically significant effects on the number of employees recruited into these SMEs, or that the grants are associated with an increase in the demand for high human capital workers. The lack of statistically significant findings is troublesome considering that government support programs require a positive impact to cover the administrative costs associated with these programs.
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