We study the impact of transparency in a commodity market on the decision problem of a competitive firm under price uncertainty and hedging opportunities. Market transparency is modeled by means of the informational content of publicly observable signals which are correlated with the random price. We find that the impact of more transparency on labor employment and production depends on the fir...

Age Structure of the Workforce and Firm Performance In this contribution, we examine the interrelation between corporate age structures and firm performance. In particular, we address the issues, whether firms with young rather than older employees are successful and whether firms with homogeneous or heterogeneous workforces are doing well. Several theoretical approaches are discussed with resp...

While several plots of the aggregate age distribution suggest that firm age is exponentially distributed, we find some departures from the exponential benchmark. At the lower tail, we find that very young establishments are more numerous than expected, but they face high exit hazards. At the upper tail, the oldest firms are older than the exponential would have predicted. Furthermore, the age d...

This version of January 26, 2007. German chemical manufacturing industry experienced a major downsizing during 1992–2004. On the average, size of the firm almost halved. Using modern frontier efficiency analysis, this paper investigates technical and scale efficiency of firms. Based on reliable census data, analysis suggests that firms were not primarily concerned with improving technical effic...

The eukaryotic and prokaryotic ribosomal proteins that bind to Escherichia coli 5 S rRNA were identified by affinity chromatography. The E. coli ribosomal proteins that associated with the nucleic acid were L5, L18, and L25 confirming earlier findings using the same and different procedures. The rat liver ribosomal proteins that associated with E. coli 5 S rRNA were L6, L7, L19, L35a, and S9; s...

This paper analyzes the effect of immigrants’ networks on the decision of individual firms to starting exporting to the immigrants’ home country. Existing evidence on the trade-creating effect of immigrants show a robust effect, however at the national or regional level. Using French exports at the firm-level to 61 countries, I find that increasing the number of foreign immigrants in the region...

Serial correlation in annual growth rates carries a lot of information on growth processes – it allows us to directly observe firm performance as well as to test theories. Using a 7-year balanced panel of 10 000 French manufacturing firms, we observe that small firms typically are subject to negative correlation of annual growth rates, whereas larger firms display positive correlation. Furtherm...

In Lentz and Mortensen (2005), we formulate and estimate a market equilibrium model of endogenous growth through product innovation in the spirit of Klette and Kortum (2004). In this paper, we provide a quantitative solution to the social planner’s problem in the modeled environment. We find that the optimal growth rate is over three times larger than its value in market equilibrium and that th...

In a large sample of entrepreneurs, 2D:4D (second-to-fourth digit) ratio and managerial performance are studied. Entrepreneurs with lower ratio manage larger firms, manage larger firms when acquire control and experience faster average growth. Firms run by high prenatal testosterone entrepreneurs have lower profitability as measured by return on assets and return on sales. Prenatal testosterone...