How much do a manager’s interpersonal skills with subordinates, which we call people management skills, affect employee outcomes? Are managers rewarded for having such skills? Using personnel data from a large, high-tech firm, we show that survey-measured people management skills have a strong negative relation to employee turnover. A causal interpretation is reinforced by research designs expl...

Different from the typical findings in the privatization literature, this study of 31 Singapore government-linked companies (GLCs) covering a period from 1975 to1998 shows no significant changes in performance upon share issue privatization. Also, there is no evidence that the GLCs are less profitable than a selected group of non-GLCs that match by size and industry. Taking a buy-andhold strate...

For many real-world markets (such as media, telecommunications, high tech markets, commercial aircrafts, etc.), incurring endogenous sunk costs (in the form of quality enhancing expenditures), in the presence of R&D spillovers, is an essential feature of competition. We study the interaction between these sunk costs and R&D spillovers relying on the Sutton’s concept of endogenous sunk costs and...

Empirical studies of household portfolios have shown that young and relatively poor households hold under-diversified portfolios that are concentrated in a small number of assets, a fact often attributed to various behavioral biases. We present a model that offers a potential rational alternative: we show that relatively poor investors; i.e., investors with little financial wealth, who receive ...

This paper presents the findings of a survey of 237 high tech small and medium sized businesses based in the UK. The survey is part of an ongoing comparative study of high tech small businesses in the UK and Japan. The paper describes the growth, innovative activity and market structure of businesses studied. Based on characteristics of the businesses and their CEOs five ‘types’ of high tech sm...

The aim of this paper is to test whether patent-based indicators are still reliable measures of innovativeness in light of organizational changes in the field of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection and the regulatory reforms already under way respectively at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the European Patent Office (EPO). For most high-tech industries, patents repres...

The aim of this paper is to test whether patent-based indicators are still reliable measures of innovativeness in light of organizational changes in the field of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection and the regulatory reforms already under way respectively at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the European Patent Office (EPO). For most high-tech industries, patents repres...

You’d Be Perfect for This:” Understanding the Value of Hiring through Referrals Employee referrals are a very common means by which firms hire new workers. Past work suggests that workers hired via referrals often perform better than non-referred workers, but we have little understanding as to why. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is primarily because referrals allow firms to select work...