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Ownership and Managerial Competition: Employee, Customer, or Outside Ownership

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  • Patrick Bolton
  • Chenggang Xu
Abstract
This paper centres around the question of ownership of firms and managerial competition and how these affect manager and employees' incentives to invest in human capital. We argue that employee's incentives in human capital investment are affected by both ownership and competition since both ownership structure and competition provide bargaining chips to employees. Ownership provides protections which may improve or dull employees' incentives for human capital investment. When there is fierce market competition and no lock-in the allocation of ownership does not play a role (as one might expect), provided that human and physical assets are sufficiently complementary. If asset complementarity is low, ownership matters even in the absence of lock-in. In general, the most efficient ownership arrangement is that which maximizes managerial competition inside the firm.

Suggested Citation

  • Patrick Bolton & Chenggang Xu, 2001. "Ownership and Managerial Competition: Employee, Customer, or Outside Ownership," STICERD - Theoretical Economics Paper Series 412, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:stitep:412
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Mansur Lubabah Kwambo & Ahmad Bawa Abdul-Qadir, 2013. "Dispersed Equity Holding and Financial Performance of Banks in Nigeria," International Journal of Academic Research in Accounting, Finance and Management Sciences, Human Resource Management Academic Research Society, International Journal of Academic Research in Accounting, Finance and Management Sciences, vol. 3(1), pages 238-247, January.
    2. Chong-En Bai & Chenggang Xu, 2001. "Ownership, Incentives and Monitoring," STICERD - Theoretical Economics Paper Series 413, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE.
    3. Matouschek, Niko, 1999. "Foreign Direct Investment and Spillovers through Backward Linkages," CEPR Discussion Papers 2283, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Ownership; competition; incomplte contracts; human capital;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
    • L20 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - General
    • D21 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Theory
    • D40 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - General

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