Management and Economic Performance

不同企业的生产率、创新能力和向新产品空间过渡的能力差异很大。这些差异对于理解经济发展和结构变化至关重要，而本研究关注的是一个潜在的重要决定因素：管理资本。研究的背景是战后的日本，这个背景既提供了大规模的自然实验，也提供了极其丰富的数据。在占领日本期间，盟军对日本大公司的高级管理人员进行了“经济清洗”。在1937年至1945年期间，在资产净值超过1亿日元的公司工作的管理人员被强制撤职，并被禁止在其他大公司担任管理职务。他们通常会跳槽到新兴行业的公司，这些行业不是由大型企业集团主导的。大清洗可能会剥夺日本大公司稀缺的人才，从而降低经济表现，或者也可能为更年轻、有创新精神的领导人获得立足点扫清道路。它还可以通过引导人才进入新兴行业来促进创新，这些行业往往不受清洗的影响。然而，如果管理资本主要根植于组织规范而不是个人，那么清洗的效果可能有限。这项研究通过比较经理被清洗的公司和经理收入略低于1亿日元的公司来估计清洗的影响。它还考察了被清洗的经理跳槽到的公司的表现。最后，对于那些在殖民地台湾经营的分支机构的经理，它检查了与前台湾员工的持续联系是否有助于这些员工随后过渡到与前日本经理相关的行业。具体而言，研究人员使用回归不连续设计来估计清洗对经理被移走的公司和这些经理被移走的公司的影响。后者需要建立一个由公司组成的控制组，如果被清洗的话，刚好低于临界值的经理可能会被转移到这个控制组。这可以通过使用档案数据来估计包含丰富的个人、公司和网络级别特征的经理转换模型来完成。本研究也利用同样似是而非的外生变异来检验管理关系是否也帮助台湾企业家转型到这些产业。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Productivity, innovative capacity, and the ability to transition into new product spaces vary significantly across firms. These differences are central to understanding economic development and structural change, and this research focuses on one potentially important determinant: managerial capital. The context is post-war Japan, a setting that offers both a large-scale natural experiment and extremely rich data. During the occupation of Japan, Allied Forces implemented an "economic purge" of senior managers in large Japanese firms. Managers who had been employed at any time between 1937 and 1945 at firms with a net worth of over one hundred million yen were subjected to mandatory removal from their posts and barred from managerial positions in other large firms. They typically moved to firms in newer industries, which were not dominated by large conglomerates. The purge may have lowered economic performance by depriving Japan's large firms of scarce talent, or alternatively may have cleared the way for younger, innovative leaders to gain a foothold. It could have also promoted innovation by channeling talent into newer, rising industries, which tended to be exempt from the purge. However, if managerial capital is primarily embedded in organizational norms rather than in individuals, the purge may have had limited effects. This research estimates the impacts of the purge by comparing firms whose managers were purged to firms who barely avoided the purge by being just below the one hundred-million-yen cutoff. It also examines the performance of the firms to which purged managers moved. Finally, for those managers at branches that operated in colonial Taiwan, it examines whether ongoing connections with former Taiwanese employees helped these employees to subsequently transition into industries related to those of their former Japanese managers. Specifically, the investigators use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impacts of the purge on the firms whose managers were removed and on the firms to which these managers moved. The latter requires constructing a control group consisting of firms to which managers just below the cutoff would have plausibly transitioned had they been purged. This can be done by using archival data to estimate a model of manager transitions that includes rich individual, firm, and network level characteristics. This research also exploits the same plausibly exogenous variation to test whether managerial connections helped Taiwanese entrepreneurs to also transition into these industries.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.