We show that Tobin's q, as proxied by the ratio of the firm's market value to its book value, increases with the firm's systematic equity risk and falls with the firm's unsystematic equity risk. Further, an increase in the firm's total equity risk is associated with a fall in q. The negative relation between the change in total risk and the change in q is robust through time for the whole sampl...

Stronger intellectual property rights (IPRs) induce specialization and contribute to economic growth. In the United States, a sweeping pro-patent legal reform in 1982 fostered specialization and enhanced firm performance. Around the world, countries experience faster economic growth when their innovating sectors are characterized by a higher level of specialization. An endogenous growth model w...

Traditional agency theory assumes that managers are egoistic and need incentives to act in the best interests of the firm. As such, agency theory is a key determinant of firm size, capital structure, corporate governance, and firm value. However, traditional theory ignores the fact that some people are virtuous and do not need such incentives. If some employees are selfless, diligent, and have ...

The distribution of firm sizes is known to be heavy tailed. In order to account for this stylized fact, previous economic models have focused mainly on growth through investments in a company's own operations (internal growth). Thereby, the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on the firm size (external growth) is often not taken into consideration, notwithstanding its potential large impac...

This paper aims to reconcile the logic behind stochastic models of firm growth and the notion of organizational capabilities as drivers of economic performance. In the proposed behavioral model of bounded rational firms, two mechanisms drive growth: independent stochastic growth of individual opportunities and the process by which firms capture new opportunities. To extend the stochastic framew...

Fast growth by a firm often can lead to conflict with its competitors over market shares. This conflict impacts on the growth rate of the firm as well as on industry structure. The nature of these impacts depends on the competitive strategies adopted by the firm and its competitors. Alternative patterns of strategies are identified and analyzed, including patterns associated with Schumpeter’s t...

The revenue growth model of IT services firms has been historically been based on scaling of firm size by adding new employees. Speculation exists that revenue growth is linear in nature; however no rigorous examination of this fact exists in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the nature of growth of firms in the Indian IT services industry. In addition to scaling firms have been loo...

This paper examines the determinants of firm growth in the Swedish energy sector using a sample of 200 energy firms active from 2000 to 2010. The article has two aims. First, we seek to investigate whether there is reason to believe that the Swedish energy market will become more concentrated in the future, dominated by a few firms. That would be the result if, for example, large firms systemat...

This paper investigates whether the skewness of firm fundamentals is informative about future firm performance and stock returns. We present two distinct preference-free theoretical models of firm fundamentals, both of which imply a positive relation between the skewness of firm fundamentals and expected stock return. Consistent with this implication, we show empirically that the skewness measu...