سرمایه سازمانی و چرخه زندگی شرکت
Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Literature review and hypothesis development
3- Research design
4- Results and discussion
5- Concluding remarks
References
Abstract
We hypothesize, and examine empirically, two types of association between organization capital and firm life cycle. Are firms with high organization capital more likely to be in a particular stage of their life cycle than firms with low organization capital? Are firms' transitions from one life cycle stage to another over time associated with how much they invest in organization capital? Our findings suggest that firms with high (low) organization capital are more likely to be in the introduction and decline (growth and maturity) stages. Our results also show that firms that invest more in organization capital (i.e., changes in organization capital) are less (more) likely to move to the introduction, shake-out and decline (growth and maturity) stages in the subsequent five years. Our results are robust to alternative specifications of organization capital, life cycle proxies and endogeneity concerns.
Introduction
Firm-level organization capital may be defined as the accumulation of firm-specific knowledge that “enables superior operating, investment and innovation performance, represented by the agglomeration of technologies—business practices, processes and designs” (Lev et al. 2009, p. 277). It manifests itself in the form of organization practices, processes, systems, and culture. Recent studies suggest that organization capital plays an important role in improving the efficiency and productivity of the firm. In recent studies, both Peters and Taylor (2017) and Eisfeldt and Papanikolaou (2014) note that organization capital is an increasingly important part of the US and global capital stock. Prior studies (Lev and Radhakrishnan 2005; Lev et al. 2009) also show that investment in organization capital forms the basis of sustainable competitive advantage. As Atkeson and Kehoe (2005) (hereafter called A&K (2005)) remark, economists have long thought that firm life cycle (hereafter FLC) is driven by organization capital. Based on this idea, they develop a simple growth model of FLC where firm life cycle, as captured by the life cycle of firm’s profit (or organization rent), is expressed as a function of firm-specific knowledge (or organization capital) in equilibrium, and used to measure the overall size of this capital in the US economy by calibration. Their analysis demonstrates that organization capital is relatively important, because payments from organization capital are more than one-third of payments from physical capital, net of new investment. However, the role of organization capital in influencing the progression of a firm in its life cycle stages remains unclear and deserves a systematic study. We aim to fill this gap in the literature. Our paper is different from that of A&K (2005) in the following ways. First, the objective of A&K (2005) is to measure the aggregate size (or share) of organization capital in an economy, while our objective is to examine the association between life cycle and organization capital at firm level empirically. Second, A&K (2005)'s approach is, by way of calibration, to assess the ability of their model to mimic features of the actual economy, but our approach is concerned about estimation and hypothesis testing for the relation between life cycle and organization capital. Thus, our approach compliments that of A&K (2005).