Openness, Managerial Incentives and Heterogeneous Firms

Zhihong Yu ()

Discussion Papers from University of Nottingham, GEP

Abstract: Motivated by new evidence that managerial incentives play an important role in determining firm productivity, this paper incorporates the principal-agent mechanism into the new heterogeneous firm trade framework to examine the link between openness and endogenous firm productivity. We show that firm heterogeneity plays a crucial role in the effects of openness on firms’ optimal incentive contracts via the trade-induced “carrot and stick” effect. This mechanism increases the marginal value of managerial effort, which motivates the firm owners (principals) to offer a higher power contract to the managers (agents) to reduce managerial slacks. The intra-firm managerial incentive mechanism stressed in this paper could be viewed as complementary to the inter-firm reallocation effect in the Melitz (2003) model in explaining the observed link between openness and aggregate productivity.

Keywords: openness; managerial incentives; heterogeneous firms; productivity. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/gep/documents/papers/2008/08-17.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Openness, managerial incentives, and heterogeneous firms (2012)
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:not:notgep:08/17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from University of Nottingham, GEP School of Economics University of Nottingham University Park Nottingham NG7 2RD. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hilary Hughes ().