First Look

Working Papers

Local Dividend Clienteles

Abstract

We exploit demographic variation to identify the effect of dividend demand on firm payout policy. Retail investors tend to hold local stocks and older investors prefer dividend-paying stocks. Together, these tendencies generate geographically varying demand for dividends. Firms headquartered in areas in which seniors constitute a large fraction of the population are more likely to pay dividends, initiate dividends, and have higher dividend yields. However, the fraction of seniors is uncorrelated with share repurchases, investment, or profitability, suggesting that geographic variation in dividend payout is not driven by some unmeasured firm characteristic affecting the ability or willingness to distribute cash to shareholders. We also provide indirect evidence as to why firm managers may cater to the demand for dividends from local seniors. Overall, these results suggest that the composition of a firm's investor base affects corporate policy choices.

Download the paper from NBER ($5): http://papers.nber.org/papers/W15175

Strategies to Fight Ad-sponsored Rivals

Abstract

We analyze the optimal strategy of a high-quality incumbent that faces a low-quality ad-sponsored competitor. In addition to competing through adjustments of tactical variables such as price or advertising intensity, we allow the incumbent to consider changes in its business model. We consider four alternative business models—two pure models (subscription-based and ad-sponsored) and two mixed models that are hybrids of the two pure models. We show that the optimal response to an ad-sponsored rival often entails business model reconfigurations, a phenomenon that we dub "competing through business models." We also find that when there is an ad-sponsored entrant, the incumbent is more likely to prefer to compete through a pure, rather than a mixed, business model because of cannibalization and endogenous vertical differentiation concerns. We discuss how our study helps improve our understanding of notions of strategy, business model, and tactics in the field of strategy.

Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/10-026.pdf

Specific Knowledge and Divisional Performance Measurement

Abstract

This paper discusses five common divisional performance measurement methods—cost centers, revenue centers, profit centers, investment centers, and expense centers—while providing a theory that explains when each of these methods is likely to be the most efficient. The central insight of the theory is that each method offers a different way of aligning decision-making authority with valuable "specific knowledge" inside the organization. The theory suggests that cost and revenue centers work best in cases where headquarters has good information about cost and demand functions, product quality, and optimal output mix. Profit centers—defined as business units whose managers have responsibility for overall profits but not the authority to make major capital spending decisions—tend to supplant revenue and cost centers when line managers have a significant informational advantage over headquarters and when there are few interdependencies (or "synergies") between divisions. Investment centers—profit centers in which unit managers are allowed to make major investment decisions—tend to prevail when the activity is capital intensive and when it is difficult for headquarters to identify the value-maximizing investment strategy for the business unit. In evaluating the performance of profit centers, rate-of-return measures like ROA are likely to be effective when unit managers do not have major influence over the level of new investment. But, in the case of investment centers, Economic Value Added, or EVA, is likely to be the most effective single-period measure because it is designed to encourage only value-increasing investment decisions.

Download the paper from SSRN (free registration required): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1475725

Breakthrough Inventions and Migrating Clusters of Innovation

Abstract

We investigate the speed at which clusters of invention for a technology migrate spatially following breakthrough inventions. We identify breakthrough inventions as the top 1% of U.S. inventions for a technology during 1975-1984 in terms of subsequent citations. Patenting growth is significantly higher in cities and technologies where breakthrough inventions occur after 1984 relative to peer locations that do not experience breakthrough inventions. This growth differential in turn depends on the mobility of the technology's labor force, which we model through the extent that technologies depend upon immigrant scientists and engineers. Spatial adjustments are faster for technologies that depend heavily on immigrant inventors. The results qualitatively confirm the mechanism of industry migration proposed in models like Duranton. [Duranton, G., 2007. "Urban Evolutions: The Fast, the Slow, and the Still." American Economic Review 97, 197.221].

Download the paper from SSRN (free registration required): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1471435

Systemic Risk and the Refinancing Ratchet Effect

Abstract

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market—rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities—led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur simultaneously, as they did over the past decade, they impose an unintentional synchronization of homeowner leverage. This synchronization, coupled with the indivisibility of residential real estate that prevents homeowners from deleveraging when property values decline and homeowner equity deteriorates, conspire to create a "ratchet" effect in which homeowner leverage is maintained or increased during good times without the ability to decrease leverage during bad times. If refinancing-facilitated homeowner-equity extraction is sufficiently widespread—as it was during the years leading up to the peak of the U.S. residential real-estate market—the inadvertent coordination of leverage during a market rise implies higher correlation of defaults during a market drop. To measure the systemic impact of this ratchet effect, we simulate the U.S. housing market with and without equity extractions and estimate the losses absorbed by mortgage lenders by valuing the embedded put-option in non-recourse mortgages. Our simulations generate loss estimates of $1.5 trillion from June 2006 to December 2008 under historical market conditions, compared to simulated losses of $280 billion in the absence of equity extractions.

Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/10-023.pdf

Policy Bundling to Overcome Loss Aversion: A Method for Improving Legislative Outcomes (revised)

Abstract

Policies that would create net benefits for society but would also involve costs frequently lack the necessary support to be enacted because losses loom larger than gains psychologically. To reduce this harmful consequence of loss aversion, we propose a new type of policy-bundling technique in which related bills that have both costs and benefits are combined. Using a laboratory study, we confirm across a set of four legislative domains that this bundling technique increases support for bills that have both costs and benefits. We also demonstrate that this effect is due to changes in the psychology of decision making, rather than voters' willingness to compromise and support a bill they weakly oppose when that bill is bundled with one they strongly support.

Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-147.pdf