The "resource-based view of the firm" has become an important conceptual framework in strategic management but has been widely criticized for lack of an empirical base. To address this deficit, we utilize a new method for identifying interfirm differences in efficiency within the context of stochastic frontier production functions. Using data on Japanese and U.S. automobile manufacturers, we develop measures of resources and capabilities and test for linkages with firm performance. The results show the influence of manufacturing proficiency and scale economies at the firm and plant level. We apply the parameter estimates to account for Toyota's superior efficiency relative to other producers.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) play a central role in companies' strategies. This dissertation investigates how the location of merging companies and their competitors in the geographical, product market, or technological space influences key aspects of M&As, including the takeover price, the acquiring and the target companies' returns, the method of payment, and the spillover effects on the valuation of competitors. In particular, Chapter 1 studies how the geographical location of acquiring and target companies affects the competitiveness of the acquisition process and therefore the acquisition price. Chapter 2 investigates whether face-to-face interactions with the target's employees before an acquisition provide informational advantages to the acquirer and translate into higher acquisition returns. Chapter 3 looks at the perspective of the seller and studies how the geographical distance to the acquiring company affects the seller's incentives to retain partial ownership of the combined entity. Chapter 4 analyzes the market value spillovers of an acquisition announcement on competitors, and proposes a way to empirically disentangle the negative product market rivalry effect from a positive technological signaling effect.

This dissertation examines how managerial labor markets and organizational structures shape firm strategies and outcomes. Chapter 1 focuses on the firm’s decision to hire a CEO from within or outside the company and suggests a different way to approach the CEO selection process in multi-unit firms. Chapter 2 investigates the post-merger and acquisition (post-M&A) retention strategies of target managers and how their structural knowledge plays a role in such decisions. Chapter 3 examines internal organizational structures as barriers to the promotion of women managers.

Many firms engage in activities aimed at making prices less transparent – tactics that may be referred to collectively as price obfuscation. Existing theory does not explain the substantial heterogeneity that exists both within and across industries with respect to the prevalence of these practices. The essays herein thus seek to shed further light on this phenomenon. In particular, I address several interrelated questions: what incentives drive firms to obfuscate in the first place, what are the potential consequences (if any) of doing so, and how do these tradeoffs vary depending on firm characteristics and market conditions? Novel empirical results are drawn from U.S. hotel industry data in Chapters 1 and 2; in Chapter 3, I synthesize existing price obfuscation literature from a range of disciplines and provide several illustrative case studies. Taken together, these three essays build toward a more comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding why, in practice, some firms utilize obfuscation (and deceptive tactics more broadly) while others do not.

This dissertation investigates the effects of a financial crisis on the productivity of firms. It contains four separate studies. The first study conceptually reviews how the productivity of firms changes during a financial crisis. It introduces two conceptual effects of a financial crisis: (a) the effect that cleanses inefficient elements out of the economy; and (b) the effect that provides surviving firms with an opportunity of productivity improvement. This chapter further describes how the financial sector and governments may react during a financial crisis, and thus affect the productivity of the economy. The remainder of the dissertation empirically examines the effect of a financial crisis on the productivity of firms by investigating the 1997 Korean crisis.

The second study analyzes the effect of a financial crisis on the dispersion of productivity. Specifically, it examines whether there is a statistically-significant change in productivity dispersion between the pre- and post-crisis periods. To test whether the increase in dispersion is significant, the variance decomposition model is applied. Specifically, the measuring of variance decomposition at both the inter- and intra-industry levels allows us to investigate the change in variance within industries while controlling for the change in variance between industries, and vice versa. The results of this chapter empirically confirm that the increase in productivity variation between the pre- and post-crisis periods was statistically significant in the Korean crisis.

The third study investigates the effectiveness of the government-driven restructuring in the corporate sector. Restructuring of the corporate sector has been recognized as a key to recovery from financial crises. However, there is no general consensus in terms of how to best conduct corporate restructuring during a financial crisis. To measure the effectiveness of a government driven corporate restructuring process, the study investigates the ``workouts'' mandated by the government during the 1997 Korean crisis. Specifically, it draws upon a method of ``matching" to compare the firms that actually participated in the workout with the firms that did not go through such a workout, but which were otherwise similar to the participant firms. The study finds no statistical difference in terms of productivity improvement between the participant firms and non-participant firms.

The final study analyzes how business groups can improve their group productivity by restructuring their business portfolio in response to rare opportunities provided by a financial crisis. The overall group level productivity can be improved by four distinct activities of portfolio restructuring: (a) improving productivity of its individual affiliates; (b) acquiring productive businesses; (c) discarding unproductive affiliates; or (d) reallocating resources among affiliates to support the growth of higher performing affiliates. Employing the method of productivity decomposition, this study investigates how each of four activities of portfolio restructuring contributes to the change of group productivity.