Evan Rawley

Diversification, Diseconomies of Scope, and Vertical Contracting: Evidence from the Taxicab Industry

This paper studies how firms reorganize following diversification, proposing that firms use outsourcing, or vertical disintegration, to manage diseconomies of scope. We also consider the origins of scope diseconomies, showing how different underlying mechanisms generate contrasting predictions about the link between within-firm task heterogeneity and the incentive to outsource following diversification. We test these propositions using microdata on taxicab and limousine fleets from the Economic Census. The results show that taxicab firms outsource, by shifting the composition of their fleets toward owner-operator drivers, when they diversify into the limousine business. The magnitude of the shift toward driver ownership is larger in less urban markets, where the tasks performed by taxicab and limousine drivers are more similar. These findings suggest that (1) firms use outsourcing to manage diseconomies of scope at a particular point in the value chain and (2) interagent conflicts can be an important source of scope diseconomies.

Information Technology, Productivity, and Asset Ownership: Evidence from Taxicab Fleets

We develop a simple model that links the adoption of a productivity-enhancing technology to increased vertical integration and a less skilled workforce. We test the model’s key prediction using novel microdata on vehicle ownership patterns from the Economic Census during a period when computerized dispatching systems were first adopted by taxicab firms. Controlling for time-invariant firm-specific effects, firms increase the proportion of taxicabs under fleet ownership by 12% when they adopt new computerized dispatching systems. An instrumental variables analysis suggests that the link between dispatching technology and vertical integration is causal. These findings suggest that increasing a firm’s productivity can lead to increased vertical integration, even in the absence of asset specificity.

Why Are Firms Rigid? A General Framework and Empirical Tests

We present a general framework for understanding why firms are slow to make major strategic changes in a wide range of empirical settings. We then apply this framework to investigate, more specifically, the relationship between firm age and scope in hedge funds. Our empirical analyses demonstrate that younger hedge funds outperform older hedge funds both before and after the launch of a new fund. Based on our framework, these results suggest that age-based rigidity in hedge funds is more attributable to internal political frictions that influence project selection than to constraints associated with exchange partners or implementation costs. We conclude by discussing how our framework can be used to identify the dominant source of rigidity in other contexts.

Inherited Agglomeration Effects in Hedge Funds

This paper studies inherited agglomeration effects, how human capital that accrues to managers while working at a parent firm in an industry hub can be subsequently transferred to a spinoff. We test for inherited agglomeration effects in the context of the hedge fund industry and find that hedge fund managers who previously worked in New York and London outperform their peers who worked elsewhere previously by 10-14 basis points per month or about 1.5% per year. The results are driven by managers who worked in investment management positions previously, and are at least as large as traditional agglomeration effects that arise from being located in an industry hub contemporaneously. The evidence suggests that inherited agglomeration effects are an important, but as yet overlooked, factor influencing the performance of new firms.

HORIZONTAL DIVERSIFICATION AND VERTICAL CONTRACTING: FIRM SCOE AND ASSET OWNERSHIP IN TAXI FLEETS.

This paper considers the vertical implications of horizontal diversification. Many studies have documented organizational problems following corporate diversification. We propose that selective vertical dis-integration – shifting asset ownership to agents – can mitigate rent-seeking and coordination failures in the diversified firm. We test this proposition in a particularly simple setting that allows us to isolate the effects of interest and control for the likely endogeneity of diversification: taxi fleets that diversify into the limousine, or black car, segment following a wave of entry deregulation in the early 1990s. The results show that taxi fleets are substantially more likely to use owner-operator drivers following diversification. Moreover, diversified fleets that use a greater share of owner operators are more productive than diversified fleets that own most of their vehicles. We interpret these findings as evidence that firms re-organize in response to the challenges of diversification, and that there are causal links between the horizontal and vertical boundaries of the fleet.

Interdependence and Performance: A Natural Experiment in Firm Scope

This paper shows how interdependencies influence performance following a reduction in firm scope. We test the predictions of the theory using detailed microdata on every Peruvian fishing firm before and after a regulatory ban on mackerel fishing, finding that a reduction in the scope of activities causes the productivity of firms’ legacy anchovy operations to fall sharply, before recovering in the long run. The results are most pronounced for firms with the strongest interdependencies between activities. Moreover, we find evidence that the persistence of the productivity decline is explicitly tied to a failure to adapt quickly following the ban. Consistent with our conceptual characterization, the evidence suggests that interdependencies between activities simultaneously create benefits as well as costs, but that costs are more persistent when the firm reduces its scope of activities.

Learning on the Job? Entrepreneurial Spawning in the Asset Management Industry *

Entrepreneurs often have prior experience at incumbent firms. We present a new mechanism by which prior employment can influence transitions into entrepreneurship. We propose that some employees divert effort toward unproductive activities to learn about their own fitness for alternative employment. Based on the results of this costly learning experience, or “experiment,” some employees will spawn into related industry segments as entrepreneurs or employees. Others will remain at the incumbent firm or pursue entrepreneurship in the same industry segment. We develop a theoretical model to explicate these propositions, and test them using four data sets from the mutual fund and hedge fund industries. We find evidence that individuals who engage in excessive risk-taking at mutual funds are more likely to transition into hedge funds. Taken together, our findings suggest that learning on the job through experimentation is an important mechanism for enabling entrepreneurial spawning.

Intra-Firm Spillovers? The Stock and Flow Effects of Collocation

We study how intra-firm collocation — geographic clustering of business establishments owned by the same parent company — influences performance, decomposing the collocation effect into stocks and flows to learn about the mechanisms behind intra-firm agglomeration. Using Census micro data on the full population of U.S. hotels and restaurants from 1977-2007, we find that doubling the intensity of intra-firm collocation is associated with a productivity increase of about 2%. Further analyses reveal that a significant component of the productivity gains are attributable to stock effects, in the sense that productivity effects persist after an establishment ceases to be collocated. The results are consistent with the idea that proximity to other establishments owned by the same parent firm facilitates knowledge transfer, which has broad implications for firm strategy.

Temporal Specificity and Task Alignment: Evidence from Patient Care

We show how integration solves temporal specificity problems that arise from the misalignment of tasks between organizations and test the predictions of the model, using a large and rich patient-level dataset on hospital discharges to nursing homes and home health care. As predicted by the theory, we find that vertical integration allows hospitals to shift patient recovery tasks downstream to lower cost delivery systems by discharging patients earlier and in poorer health; and integration leads to greater post-hospitalization service intensity. While integration facilitates a shift in the allocation of tasks, health outcomes are no worse when patients receive care from an integrated provider. The evidence suggests that by improving the alignment of tasks to assets, integration solves temporal specificity problems that arise in market exchange.