Essays in firm performance with macroeconomic implications
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This thesis is concerned with how firms interact with factors in their economic environment, and the implications this has for the macroeconomy. First, I examine the role of bank lending frictions and housing collateral for small business credit during the Great Recession. I use a new dataset from the leading online accounting software in the United States with millions of financial transactions for small businesses. I find that bank failures during the Great Recession are associated with declines in credit for small firms but not micro firms. In contrast, movements in house prices at the owner's ZIP code are positively associated with credit for micro firms but not small firms. The results suggest differences within small businesses in the channels used to overcome asymmetric information: micro firms appear to depend more on housing collateral and small firms on lending relationships, consistent with the associated costs to lenders. Next, I study how weak institutional environments in poor countries lead to low tax compliance, especially for firms where owners have high-powered incentives and managerial control. Using evidence for publicly-traded manufacturing firms in India, this paper shows that when there is continued involvement of the founding family, firms pay less excise tax than in other firms. In addition, firms respond by less to an increase in the tax rate compared to non-family firms. I find that the difference between family and non-family firms' tax compliance decreases with the introduction of mandatory online filing. These family firm tend to be smaller and less productive, indicating that the lower effective tax rates may divert resources away from larger, more productive firms and reduces aggregate output and productivity. Finally, in work with with the US Census Bureau and coauthors, a new survey of "structured" management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants is conducted and studied. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variation across plants within the same firm. We find evidence for four "drivers" of management: competition, business environment, learning spillovers and human capital. Collectively, these drivers account for about a third of the dispersion in structured management practices.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Patnaik, Megha |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics. |
| Primary advisor | Bloom, Nick, 1973- |
| Thesis advisor | Bloom, Nick, 1973- |
| Thesis advisor | Bernstein, Shai |
| Thesis advisor | Moser, Petra |
| Advisor | Bernstein, Shai |
| Advisor | Moser, Petra |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Megha Patnaik. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by Megha Patnaik
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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