Limited Managerial Attention and Corporate Aging

Claudio F. Loderer, René Stulz and Urs Waelchli
Additional contact information
Claudio F. Loderer: Institute for Financial Management, University of Bern
Urs Waelchli: Institute for FInancial Management, University of Bern

Working Paper Series from Ohio State University, Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics

Abstract: As firms have more assets in place, more of management's limited attention is focused on managing assets in place rather than developing new growth options. Consequently, as firms grow older, they have fewer growth options and a lower ability to generate new growth options. This simple theory predicts that Tobin's q falls with age. Further, competition in the product market is expected to slow down the decrease in Tobin's q because it forces firms to look for alternative sources of rents. Similarly, greater competition in the labor market reduces the decrease in Tobin's q with age because old firms are in a better position to hire employees that can help with innovation. In contrast, competition in the market for corporate control should accelerate the decline because it forces management to focus more on managing assets in place whose performance is more directly observable than on developing growth options where results may not be observable for some time. We find strong support for these predictions in tests using exogenous variation in competition.

JEL-codes: G30 L20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cfn and nep-hrm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2320758

Related works:
Working Paper: Limited Managerial Attention and Corporate Aging (2013)
Working Paper: Limited Managerial Attention and Corporate Aging (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:ohidic:2013-13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Ohio State University, Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().