Kathryn L. Shaw

The Dynamics of Franchise Contracting: Evidence from Panel Data

This paper provides the first systematic evidence on how franchi‐sors adjust their royalty rates and franchise fees as they gain fran‐chising experience. This evidence comes from a unique panel data set that we assembled on these monetary contract terms for about 1,000 franchisors each year for the 1980–92 period. We find that there is much persistence, over time, in franchise contract terms within firms. We find this despite sizable across‐firm differences in royalty rates and franchise fees. In addition, franchisors do not systematically increase or decrease their royalty rates or franchise fees as they become better established, contrary to predictions from some specific theoretical models. We conclude that variation in contract terms is mostly determined by differences across firms, not by within‐firm changes over time. Finally, we find no negative relationship, within firms, between up‐front franchise fees and royalty rates.

An Empirical Analysis of Risk Aversion and Income Growth

Risk aversion enters many theoretical models of human capital investment, but attitudes toward risk have not been incorporated in empirical models of human capital investment. This article develops a model of the joint investment in financial wealth and human wealth to show that human capital investment is an inverse function of the degree of relative risk aversion. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, I find that wage growth is positively correlated with preferences for risk taking. More-educated individuals are also more likely to be risk takers, thus risk taking explains a portion of the returns to education.

Social Capital and Organizational Change in High‐Involvement and Traditional Work Organizations

We present new evidence indicating that changing from a traditional human resource management (HRM) environment to an innovative one entails a change not only in formal work practices, but also in the informal networks and patterns of interaction among employees. We focus on differences in the social capital of these workplaces and measure differences in the structure of interactions and information transfer among employees across a sample of manufacturing lines with a common production technology and different HRM systems. We then consider the implications of these differences and show that the change from one form of workplace practices to the other is therefore not just a matter of paying for the direct costs of a new set of HRM practices. Rather, it would involve a disruptive overhaul in the entire network of interactions among all workers at the plant.

A Formulation of the Earnings Function Using the Concept of Occupational Investment

Standard models of income determination specify income to be a function of two variables that measure postschool investment-the years of labor market experience and the years of employer tenure. This investigation develops a better proxy for general human capital investments by hypothesizing that the intensity of investment varies by occupation and that a proportion of the occupational skills are transferable with occupational change. After developing exogenous measures of these features, the occupational investment variable is calculated for the young men of the National Longitudinal Survey. Empirical work demonstrates that occupational investment is a strong determinant of income-far superior to the experience variable.

Life-Cycle Labor Supply with Human Capital Accumulation

A dynamic model of labor supply under uncertainty with endogenous human capital accumulation is developed and estimated using 1968-81 Panel Study of Income Dynamics male panel data. Given a learning-by-doing technology for human capital investment and a translog utility function, structural parameters for preferences and technology are estimated from the orthogonality conditions implied by the Euler equations assuming rational expectations. The parameter estimates conform to economic theory. Simulations of the model suggest that the intertemporal labor supply elasticity with endogenous wages will rise over the lifecycle, producing different policy implications than typical models with exogenous wages and constant intertemporal elasticities. Copyright 1989 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.

Franchising growth and franchisor entry and exit in the U.S. market: Myth and reality

Abstract Franchising has been and continues to be a very popular way to do business for a number of retailers and service businesses. However, the type of franchising that has been growing the most, namely business-format franchising, has not grown at the kind of phenomenal rates that the trade press often suggests. Since the Department of Commerce (DOC) canceled its publication Franchising in the Economy, we no longer have access to census-type data on franchising in the U.S. However, looking at the period during which the DOC did publish these data, one finds that the number of business-format franchisors is highly correlated with the number of units in these chains. Thus, we use data from recent issues of various franchisor directories to assess the number of franchisors in the U.S., and infer from this how business-format franchising has grown in the U.S. We find that business-format franchising has been growing over the last decade at a rate that is, at best, commensurate with the growth of the economy as a whole. We believe that the confusion about the extent of growth in franchising arises, in part, from the fact that many new firms enter into franchising each year, leading to the notion that this way of doing business is growing tremendously. However, we show that many firms also exit from franchising each year, for a net growth rate much below the entry rate. This paper shows that franchising is not a panacea for entrepreneurs, whether franchisor or franchisee. From the franchisors viewpoint, the high rate of exits suggests that many firms fail despite franchising, and many others choose to stop franchising after trying it for a few years. Clearly, these firms have found that franchising is not right for them. Furthermore, the results show that the characteristics of the chain at the time it becomes involved in franchising, as described in the main franchisor directories—such as the royalty rate, the advertising fee, the franchise fee, the amount of capital required, and the sector of operation—have little capacity to explain “survival.” The main variable that affects “survival” among those that are typically reported in franchisor listings is the number of years that the franchisor has been in business before starting to franchise. Hence our results suggest this is one dimension in which franchisors can make decisions that affect the probability that they will be successful in franchising. Although we are unable to explain most of the variance in outcome, the results mostly imply that other, less easily observed or quantified characteristics of the chain and the franchisor, such as maybe the “innovativeness” of the product, the amount of support provided to franchisees, the financial backing of the franchisor, etc., likely influence “success” the most, and thus, are worth investigating further. From the perspective of franchisees, the amount of exit found here suggests that in the majority of systems, franchisees cannot expect that their franchisor will be around for the whole duration of their contract—which averages about 15 years according to the Department of Commerce. This does not mean that the majority of franchised businesses will find themselves in an “exiting” system—a small minority of very well-established franchisors accounts for the majority of franchised businesses, and these are likely to remain successful for years to come. But entrepreneurs buying franchises from less established systems are likely to face franchisor exit, either failure or departure. This paper confirms that franchisees should thoroughly investigate the franchise system they want to invest in, going beyond the information about royalty rates, advertising rates, rankings, etc., found in franchisor directories, and toward more product, market, and other less easily accessible information about the chain.

The Persistence of Female Labor Supply: Empirical Evidence and Implications

Previous research has shown that female hours of work are very persistent over womens lifetimes-that women tend to be either workers or nonworkers. This paper uses PSID data from 1967 to 1987 to examine changes in persistence over time. The overall finding is that there is little change in persistence because as women entered the labor force in greater numbers they tended to become continuous workers, replacing continuous nonworkers. Among older women, spells of reduced hours are now less prolonged (holding constant a fixed effect). Among young women, the persistence of hours has increased slightly over time, and patterns of employment now appear to develop prior to marriage and continue into the married years.

Pensions and Wages: An Hedonic Price Theory Approach

This paper examines whether a tradeoff exists between the level of pension benefits and wages for comparably skilled workers. The 1983 survey of Consumer Finances is used to match detailed information on pension plans to detailed personal characteristics of a random sample of the population. The pension wage tradeoff is estimated using both a life-tine or contractual model of the labor market and the spot market model used in previous studies. The results indicate a large negative tradeoff in the contractual model but only a negligible tradeoff in the spot market model. Results from estimating the underlying structural supply and demand equation for pensions are also presented.

Using "Insider Econometrics" to Study Productivity

Griliches’ 1994 presidential address considers the limited success economists had in trying to account for the productivity slowdown of the 1970’s and 1980’s, and “urges us toward the task of observation and measurement.” In the 1990’s, the high rates of productivity growth emphasized the need for new models of productivity, this time turning to estimating organization-level determinants of productivity focusing on businesses’ use of new computerbased information technologies (IT), and new methods of work organization (Timothy Bresnahan et al., 2002). In this paper, we take up the charge to develop new data and new methods for modeling the productivity of organizations. We summarize three methods for assembling data for an “insider econometrics” study of the productivity of organizations, and we illustrate one method that we refer to as “informed survey analysis.”

Unanticipated Aggregate Disturbances and Tests of the Life-Cycle Consumption Model Using Panel Data

Several recent studies have used data on food consumption from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to test t he rational expectations life-cycle hypothesis against the alternative of prevalent liquidity constraints. These tests invoke the rational expectations restriction that income forecast errors are independent of lagged information. This restriction, however, applies only in a time-series context. It is possible that unanticipated macroeconomic disturbances cause forecast errors to be correlated.with lagged information in a cross-section of families. The authors present evidence of such a correlation in the PSID data, show that this correlation biases previous tests of the life-cycle model toward rejection, and derive a proper test of the life-cycle model using pa nel data. Copyright 1993 by MIT Press.