Excerpt
Excerpt
Growth and Decentralization in Bad Times. Philippe Aghion, Raffaella Sadun, April 8, 2015, Paper. "Is decentralization beneficial to firm performance in “bad times”? We present a model where negative demand shocks increase the importance of rapid action, and improve the alignment of incentives of managers within firms. We test this idea exploiting the heterogeneous impact of the 2008-2009 Great Recession across industries and countries using firm-level cross-country panel data combined with our survey data on firm organization. Decentralized firms perform better than their centralized counterparts in terms of sales and TFP growth..." Link