eCommons

 

ESSAYS ON FIRM DYNAMICS AND RESOURCE ALLOCATION

Access Restricted

Access to this document is restricted. Some items have been embargoed at the request of the author, but will be made publicly available after the "No Access Until" date.

During the embargo period, you may request access to the item by clicking the link to the restricted file(s) and completing the request form. If we have contact information for a Cornell author, we will contact the author and request permission to provide access. If we do not have contact information for a Cornell author, or the author denies or does not respond to our inquiry, we will not be able to provide access. For more information, review our policies for restricted content.

No Access Until

2024-06-02
Permanent Link(s)

Other Titles

Author(s)

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays in the areas of Macroeconomics and Firm Dynamics, examining the role of resource (mis)allocation on business dynamism and market outcomes. The first essay examines the role of input specificity in affecting firm-to-firm trade dynamics and how business dynamism and a sticky input market interact. I construct a novel panel data of supply chain relationships with an additional layer of input specificity measures on each linkage across US firms and point out the foreclosure effect of input specification contracts. I then propose a Schumpeterian model where each firm endogenously chooses whether to produce a specific input for an exclusive customer firm at the expense of giving up larger customer base. Bringing the micro-evidence to the equilibrium model, I show that the input specificity channel is quantitatively important and can exaggerate the downturn in business dynamism. I show that shutting down the foreclosure effect can lead to a 10% and 25% increase in growth and entry rates. In the second essay, I study the role of local vintage capital market in driving co-locations of entrants and capitalists and shaping the spatial disparities in business dynamism and productivity. I combine the US-based venture capital (VC) investment records with local business vintage capital supply across metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). I find that the VC investment elasticity with respect to local vintage capital is about 9% - 14%. Based on the motivating empirical evidence, I integrate vintage capital induced co-location of entrants and VC investment into a theoretical framework. I highlight a straightforward mechanism where a vintage capital market with abundant supply can lower the capital cost and thus increase firms' profits, attracting VC investment, encouraging entrepreneurship and further leading to a selection-induced agglomeration effect. I show that a larger city intensifies such allocative forces and thus amplifies the agglomeration effect, making the city further attractive to VC investment and entrants relative to others. The third essay, which is joint work with Qinshu Xue, examines how firm-to-firm partnership shapes a firm's innovation strategy and its implications for business dynamism. My coauthor and I combine the firm-to-firm partnership information with the patent data filed by the US publicly listed firms from 2003 to 2013. We find that the degree of firm-to-firm partnership engagement along the supply chain is positively associated with stronger incentives in conducting exploitative innovations, leading to less knowledge spillover than exploratory innovations do. To mitigate the potential selection bias, we further adopt a double debiased machine learning technique to allow for a more flexible relationship between partnership variables and control variables and confirm the positive correlation. We then propose a quality-ladder framework where firms optimally choose to either continue exploitative innovations by leveraging possible collaborations with other firms or stop them and turn to exploratory innovations for its product. Our model predicts that partnership engagement can induce more technologies that are too sophisticated to generate spillover and thus lead to a lower entry rate and precludes growth.

Journal / Series

Volume & Issue

Description

162 pages

Sponsorship

Date Issued

2022-05

Publisher

Keywords

Firm Dynamics; Resource Allocation

Location

Effective Date

Expiration Date

Sector

Employer

Union

Union Local

NAICS

Number of Workers

Committee Chair

Chau, Nancy

Committee Co-Chair

Committee Member

Johnson, Justin P.
Kanbur, Ravi

Degree Discipline

Economics

Degree Name

Ph. D., Economics

Degree Level

Doctor of Philosophy

Related Version

Related DOI

Related To

Related Part

Based on Related Item

Has Other Format(s)

Part of Related Item

Related To

Related Publication(s)

Link(s) to Related Publication(s)

References

Link(s) to Reference(s)

Previously Published As

Government Document

ISBN

ISMN

ISSN

Other Identifiers

Rights

Rights URI

Types

dissertation or thesis

Accessibility Feature

Accessibility Hazard

Accessibility Summary

Link(s) to Catalog Record