Corporate Finance and Human Capital Risk

此应用程序继续了我们先前题为“公司财务和人力资本风险”的提案的工作。这项工作是在金融经济学和劳动经济学的界面上，通过询问公司交易如何影响员工。该项目的第一部分非常成功，并产生了两份在学术界内外具有很高知名度的主要出版物。所有结果都基于在项目第一阶段创建的新的关联数据集，这些数据集结合了公司的财务信息以及就业研究所（IAB）的机构级和员工级行政数据。申请人目前正在进行第三个项目，该项目不能再作为第一资助阶段的一部分完成。对于这个扩展应用程序，我们提出了两个密切相关的项目，并以我们早期的工作为基础。第一个项目提出，并购（M&As）有助于形成内部劳动力市场，这使得合并后的公司能够更好地将员工分配到生产任务。我们对现有内部劳动力市场文献的讨论表明，尽管这一视角在内部资本市场的分析中发挥了重要作用，但迄今为止，这些文献中还没有从企业层面的角度来看待再分配和生产率。在这个已经产生了一些初步结果的项目中，我们希望展示内部劳动力市场的创建如何影响员工和企业，并为并购的动机提供一个新的视角。新兴文献认为，并购的一个重要动机是收购目标公司的雇佣关系。到目前为止，这些文献仅基于美国的数据，我们对这一论点持怀疑态度，原因我们在下面更详细地解释，其中之一是关键员工经常在收购后离开目标公司。我们将在下面讨论这种技能稀缺的并购动机，并认为其他解释，例如，收购者希望购买目标的技术更合理，能够解释文献中的大部分证据。在我们的第二个项目中，我们的目标是调查和测试这些替代解释。

This application continues the work on our prior proposal entitled “Corporate Finance and Human Capital Risk.” This work is at the interface of financial economics and labor economics by asking how corporate transactions affect employees. The first part of this project was highly successful and has resulted in two major publications with high visibility in academia and beyond. All results are based on new linked datasets, which were created during the first project phase and combine financial information about firms and establishment-level and employee-level administrative data from the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). The applicants are currently working on a third project, which cannot be completed anymore as part of the first funding phase.For this extension application, we propose two closely related projects and build on our earlier work. The first project proposes that mergers and acquisitions (M&As) serve to form internal labor markets, which allow merged firms to better allocate employees to productive tasks. Our discussion of the extant literature on internal labor markets shows that this firm-level perspective on reallocation and productivity has been absent from this literature so far, even though this perspective has played an important role in the analysis of internal capital markets. In this project, which has already produced some preliminary results, we want to show how the creation of an internal labor market affects employees and firms and provide a novel perspective on the motives for M&As.An emerging literature argues that an important motivation for M&As is the acquisition of the target firm’s employment relationships. So far, this literature is based only on US data, and we are somewhat skeptical about this argument for reasons that we explain in greater detail below, one of them being that key employees often leave the target firm after an acquisition. We discuss this skill-scarcity motivation for M&As below and argue that other explanations, e.g., that acquirers wish to buy the target’s technology are more plausible and capable of explaining much of the evidence in the literature. In our second project, we aim to investigate and test these alternative explanations.