Randall Morck

University of Alberta | UAlberta · Department of Finance and Statistical Analysis

Within countries, individual state-run banks’ lending correlates with prior money growth; similar private-sector banks’ lending does not. Aggregate credit and investment growth correlate with prior money growth more where banking systems are more state-run. Size and liquidity differences between state-run and private-sector banks do not drive these...

Where legal systems and market forces enforce contracts inadequately, vertical integration can circumvent these transaction difficulties. But, such environments often also feature highly interventionist government, and even corruption. Vertical integration might then enhance returns to political rent-seeking aimed at securing and extending market p...

Manuscript Type Perspective Research Question/Issue Can maximizing shareholder value maximize social value? Research Findings/Insights If good corporate governance is defined as maximizing a firm's contribution to overall social welfare, shareholder valuation maximization can achieve this only if capital markets are functionally efficient, a conc...

It is well recognized that individuals follow "Expert" advice, even when flawed and offers no advantage, and sometimes leads to disadvantages. The neurobiology underlying this is uncertain, and in particular there is an incomplete understanding of which brain regions are most involved when individuals chose to disobey an expert. To study this we ex...

In generating fast economic growth, China is also generating growing concern about its environmental record. Using 2000-2009 data, we find that, while spending on environmental infrastructure has visible positive environmental impact, city spending is strongly tilted towards transportation infrastructure. Investment in transportation infrastructure...

A literature review demonstrates credible evidence linking higher firm-specific stock return volatility to a more efficient stock market on one hand; and to higher firm-specific fundamentals volatility on the other. These results are reconciled if (1) market efficiency is interpreted as functionally efficiency, the allocation of capital to its best...

We find lending by state controlled banks to be significantly more associated with monetary policy than is lending by private sector banks. At the country-level, we further find monetary policy to be significantly closely linked to aggregate loan growth and aggregate fixed capital investment growth in countries whose large banks are more predominan...

Firm-level volatility of output growth of publicly listed firms in the U.S. rises in the latter 20 th century alongside falling aggregate output growth volatility of these firms. Shocks to firms have economy-wide, industry-wide, and firm-specific components. We find that the relative importance of firm-specific component steadily increase over the...

This paper compares the synchronicity of individual stock returns in different countries. For the US, Morck et al (2000) and Campbell et al (2001) show that the US in the post war period experienced an increase in firm specific stock return variations and thus a reduction in synchronicity. We show that a similar international trend, albeit weaker,...

We investigate underlying factors that explain increases in the firm-specific volatilities of stock returns and fundamentals. We find that firm-specific volatilities are significantly higher in both manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries that are more information technology (IT) intensive. We hypothesise that IT is associated with creative...

By investigating leader changes, we show that countries led by economists grow roughly one percent greater when compared to countries whose leaders have other educational backgrounds. The effect is most evident in democracies and is associated with increased business investment and trade. However, we find no evidence of immediate macroeconomic poli...

Technological innovation is not always a blessing for all the firms in an economy, or for investors who hold the market portfolio. In the late 20th century US, the market return correlates negatively with aggregate productivity growth, yet individual firms’ stock returns correlate positively with their own productivity growth. This is because most...

The financial crisis that began in 2008 and its lingering aftermath have caused many intellectuals and politicians to question the virtues of capitalist systems. This book analyzes both the strengths and weaknesses of capitalist systems. The volume opens with articles on the historical and legal origins of capitalism. These are followed by articles...

Analysts follow disproportionally firms whose fundamentals correlate more with those of their industry peers. This coverage pattern supports models of profit-maximizing information intermediaries producing preferentially information valuable in pricing more stocks. We designate highly followed firms whose fundamentals best predict those of peer fir...

Ghanaian custom views children as members of either their mother’s or father’s lineage (extended family), but not both. Patrilineal custom charges a man’s lineage with caring for his widow and children, while matrilineal custom places this burden on the widows’ lineage – her father, brothers, and uncles. Deeming custom inadequate, and to promote th...

Despite a vast accumulation of private capital, China is not embracing capitalism. Deceptively familiar capitalist features disguise the profoundly unfamiliar foundations of 'market socialism with Chinese characteristics.' The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), by controlling the career advancement of all senior personnel in all regulatory agencies, al...

No abstract available.

Family firms depend on a succession of capable heirs to stay afloat. If talent and IQ are inherited, this problem is mitigated. If, however, progeny talent and IQ display mean reversion (or worse), family firms are eventually doomed. Since family firms persist, solutions to this succession problem must exist. We submit that marriage can transfuse o...

Prominent economists present the pros and cons of government's subsidizing or protecting firms that are “national champions.” Governments around the world are deeply divided about the proper role of industrial policy, with some politicians arguing for hands-off governance and others supporting government intervention to promote “national champions”...

In the recent financial crisis, macroeconomic stimuli produced mixed results across developed economies. In contrast, China's stimulus boosted real GDP growth from an annualized 6.2% in the first quarter of 2009 trough to 11.9% in the first quarter of 2010. Amidst this phenomenal response, land auction and house prices in major cities soared. We ar...

Economics and history both strive to understand causation: economics using instrumental variables econometrics and history by weighing the plausibility of alternative narratives. Instrumental variables can lose value with repeated use because of an econometric tragedy of the commons bias: each successful use of an instrument potentially creates an...

Classic Big Push industrialization envisions state planners coordinating economic activity to internalize a range of externalities that otherwise lock in a low-income equilibrium, but runs afoul of well-known government failure problems. Successful Big Push coordination may occur instead when a large business group, acting in its controlling shareh...

The practice of adopting adults, even if one has biological children, makes Japanese family firms unusually competitive. Our nearly population-wide panel of postwar listed non-financial firms shows inherited family firms more important in postwar Japan than generally realized, and also performing well – an unusual finding for a developed economy. A...

Corporate governance matters because how well corporations utilize the people's savings matters. Many developed economies mandate that corporations be run for their public shareholders. This is not because shareholders are superior to employees, bankers, bondholders, customers, suppliers, or anyone else. Rather, it is because poor governance usuall...

An economic system called corporatism arose in the late 19^th century, promoted by Anti-Cartesian French intellectuals dismayed with the “disenchantment of the world†Weber attributed to capitalism, and by a Roman Catholic church equally dismayed with both liberalism and socialism. Corporatism recognizes the innate inequality of human...

The federal government stands poised to exercise its constitutional right to regulate financial markets, an area traditionally left to competing provincial securities commissions. The current state of securities regulation renders impotent US-style takeover defences, such as poison pills and staggered boards, but allows voting caps and pyramiding i...

Economics has firms maximizing value and people maximizing utility, but firms are run by people. Agency theory concerns the mitigation of this internal contradiction in capitalism. Firms need charters, regulations and laws to restrain those entrusted with their governance, just as economies need constitutions and independent judiciaries to restrain...

U.S. firms' stock return volatility rose fivefold from 1971 through 2000 and then reverted to near 1971 levels by 2006. This was driven mainly by a rise and fall in the firm-specific, rather than systematic, component of volatility. Firm-level total factor productivity growth volatility exhibited a similar pattern. We hypothesize that firm heteroge...

Opening up to global trade and investment is often thought to trigger institutional improvement by raising the expected benefits of institutional reform and reducing incumbents' incentives and ability to preserve the status quo. However, recent experience is not entirely consistent with this conventional wisdom. We suggest an explanation based on v...

The remote inland province of Shanxi was late Qing dynasty China’s paramount banking center. Its remoteness and China’s almost complete isolation from foreign influence at the time lead historians to posit a Chinese invention of modern banking. However, Shanxi merchants ran a tea trade north into Siberia, travelled to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and...

Different economies at different times use different institutional arrangements to constrain the people entrusted with allocating capital and other resources. Comparative financial histories show these corporate governance regimes to be largely stable through time, but capable of occasional dramatic change in response to a severe crisis. Legal orig...

This article focuses on institutional obstacles to entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs carry out a highly complicated composite act. They need intelligence to collect and digest information about business opportunities. They need foresight about the possibilities new technologies and other developments create. They need judgement and leadership skills...

Agency problems in economics virtually always entail self-interested agency exhibiting “insufficient” loyalty to principal. Social psychology also has a literature, mainly derived from work by Stanley Milgram, on issues of agency, but this emphasizes excessive loyalty – people undergoing a so-called “agentic shift” and forsaking rationality for loy...

Large pyramidal family controlled business groups are the predominant form of business organization outside America, Britain, Germany, and Japan. Large pyramidal groups comprising dozens, even hundreds, or listed and unlisted firms place the governance of large swathes of many countries' big business sectors in the hands of a few of their wealthies...

Summary Weak institutions impede foreign direction investment (FDI), yet China attracts massive FDI despite global media spotlighting its institutional infirmities. Standard institutional quality variables poorly track rapid transformations, like China' regime shift following Den Xiaoping's 1993 Southern Tour. Economy track record usefully augments...

Using complete order books from the Korea Stock Exchange for a four-year period including the 1997 Asian financial crisis, we observe (not estimate) limit order demand and supply curves for individual stocks. Both curves have demonstrably finite elasticities. These fall markedly, by about 40%, with the crisis and remain depressed long after other e...

Where legal systems and market forces enforce contracts inadequately, vertical integration can circumvent these transaction difficulties. But, such environments often also feature highly interventionist government, and even corruption. Vertical integration might then enhance returns to political rent-seeking aimed at securing and extending market p...

We observe less efficient capital allocation in countries whose banking systems are more thoroughly controlled by tycoons or families. The magnitude of this effect is similar to that of state control over banking. Unlike state control, tycoon or family control also correlates with slower economic and productivity growth, greater financial instabili...

This paper examines the propensity of firms to comove in investment decisions. Although stock return comovement and herding among investors received considerable attention in existing work, little is known about correlated investment behavior of firms. After controlling for the similarity of firm characteristics, investments are expected to comove...

We investigate the relationship between management ownership and market valuation of the fi rm, as measured by Tobin's Q. In a 1980 cross-section of 371 Fortune 500 fi rms, we fi nd evidence of a signifi cant nonmonotonic relationship. Tobin's Q fi rst increases, then declines, and fi nally rises slightly as ownership by the board of directors rise...

Many countries appear to have excessively stable big business sectors, in that higher rates of big business turnover have been correlated with faster economy growth. Public policies that stabilize big business sectors are sometimes justified as supportive of social objectives. We find no consistent link between big business stability and public goo...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

According to simple microeconomic theory, firms that do not maximize their values should not survive. We find that proxies for value maximizing corporate strategies predict survival. However, extensive diversification, low debt and low dividends (all commonly associated with non-value maximizing strategies) also predict survival. We examine various...

This paper is a comment on Family Values or Crony Capitalism? by Harold James which can be found at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2209143.

Recent economic data reveal that, at the infant stage, China's outward foreign direct investment (FDI) is biased towards tax havens and Southeast Asian countries and are mostly conducted by state-controlled enterprises with government sanctioned monopoly status. Further examination of China's savings rate, corporate ownership structures, and bank-d...

We examine international joint ventures in the telecommunications industry in Brazil, where pyramidal groups are ubiquitous. We explain how corporate governance differences between pyramidal groups versus widely held freestanding firms can lead to joint venture failures. Our empirical results show that joint ventures between pyramidal group-member...

The adjustment of prices after the arrival of new information is one of the most debated issues in finance. We use post-IPO market to examine this subject. The unique setting of immediate aftermarket allows us to assess the speed of price adjustment after the trading has just begun as investors possess little information about stock return properti...

What is good for a country may not be good for its big businesses, at least recently. More turnover in top businesses correlates with faster per capita gross domestic product, productivity, and capital growth; supporting Schumpeter's [1942. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, third ed., Harper & Bros., New York, NY] theory of “creative destruction...

Rosenstein-Rodan (1943) and others posit that rapid development requires a 'big push' -- the coordinated rapid growth of diverse complementary industries, and suggests a role for government in providing such coordination. We argue that Japan's zaibatsu, or pyramidal business groups, provided this coordination after the Meiji government failed at th...

Traditional U.S. industries with higher firm-specific stock return and fundamentals performance heterogeneity use information technology (IT) more intensively and post faster productivity growth in the late 20th century. We argue that this mechanically reflects a wave of Schumpeter's creative destruction disrupting a wide swath of industries, with...

Commenting on Jones and Khanna, we suggest that international business (IB) needs simultaneously maturing theory and on-going rigorous empirical work. We advocate careful data collection and develop solid theory based on the rich empirical information. The difficulty in the process is the deciphering of causality, and that is where historical studi...

Standard economic models assume that many small investors own firms. This is so in most large U.S. firms, but wealthy individuals or families generally hold controlling blocks in smaller U.S. firms and in all firms in most other countries. Given this, the lack of theoretical and empirical work on tightly held firms is surprising. What corporate gov...

China is now the world's largest destination of FDI, despite assessments highlighting its institutional deficiencies. But this FDI inflow corresponds closely to predicted FDI flows into China from a model that predicts FDI inflow based on government quality indicators and controls and is estimated across a sample of other weak-institution countries...

Equity ownership gives labor both a fractional stake in a firm's residual cash flows and a voice in corporate governance. Relative to other firms, labor-controlled publicly traded firms deviate more from value maximization, invest less in long-term assets, take fewer risks, grow more slowly, create fewer new jobs, and exhibit lower labor and total...

Arguments for eliminating the double taxation of dividends apply only to dividends paid by corporations to individuals. The double (and multiple) taxation of dividends paid by one firm to another – intercorporate dividends - was explicitly included in the 1930s as part of a package of tax and other policies aimed at eliminating United States pyrami...

We use a simple real options framework and empirical data to establish that although Japanese banks hold borrowers' shares, their interest is more along the lines of a contractual claimant than a residual claimant of corporations. We then explain why the Japanese model of corporate governance was useful during the "catching-up" growth of that count...

A corporation is an artificial person created for an economic purpose, as described in various aspects of the Theory of the Firm. Recent historical and comparative research shows that corporations in most countries come in groups, each controlled by a single principal. This has implications for various "theories of the firm". The perception that fi...

What is good for a country's leading corporations is generally not good for the country's overall economy. Turnover in the list of a country's top ten corporations between 1975 and 1996 is associated with faster overall economic growth, faster productivity growth, and (in high income countries) faster capital accumulation. This is critically due to...

Outside the United States and the United Kingdom, large corporations usually have controlling owners, who are usually very wealthy families. Pyramidal control structures, cross shareholding, and super-voting rights let such families control corporations without making a commensurate capital investment. In many countries, a few such families end up...

In 2003, the United States enacted a tax reform that reduced, but did not eliminate, individual dividend income taxes. Cutting the dividend tax deprives corporate insiders of a justification for retaining earnings to build unprofitable corporate empires. But not eliminating it entirely preserves an advantage for institutional investors, who can put...

For many Americans, capitalism is a dynamic engine of prosperity that rewards the bold, the daring, and the hardworking. But to many outside the United States, capitalism seems like an initiative that serves only to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few hereditary oligarchies. As A History of Corporate Governance around the World shows...

This inductive study offers an examination of 23 cases in which informants from firms engaged in large-scale global projects reported unforeseen costs after failing to comprehend cognitive-cultural, normative, and/or regulative institutions in an unfamiliar host societal context. The study builds on the conceptual framework of institutional theory....

Recent work showing that a sounder financial system is associated with faster economic growth has important implications for transition economies. Stock prices in developed economies move in highly firm-specific ways that convey information about changes in firms' marginal value of investment. This information facilitates the rapid flow of capital...

Control of corporate assets by wealthy families in economies lacking institutional integrity is common. It has negative implications on corporate governance and adverse macroeconomic effects when it extends across a sufficiently large part of the country's corporate sector. The authors consider the reasons why family control and control pyramids pr...

Greater instability in a country's list of top corporations is associated with faster economic growth. This faster growth is primarily due to faster growth in total factor productivity in industrialized countries, and faster capital accumulation in developing countries. These findings are consistent with the view that economic growth is more closel...

A panel of corporate ownership data, stretching back to 1902, shows that the Canadian corporate sector began the century with a predominance of large pyramidal corporate groups controlled by wealthy families or individuals. By mid-century, widely held firms predominated. But, from the 1970s on, pyramidal groups controlled by wealthy families and in...

Turning workers into shareholders improves corporate performance, or so advocates of employee ownership maintain. Their logic is simple: workers with a stake in their company's future are more likely to take a long-term view, which translates into higher productivity and other gains. But new research from the National Bureau of Economic Research ca...

The Common Law, parliamentary democracy, and academia all institutionalize dissent to check undue obedience to authority; and corporate governance reformers advocate the same in boardrooms. Many corporate governance disasters could often be averted if directors asked hard questions, demanded clear answers, and blew whistles. Work by Milgram suggest...

This paper compares the comovement of individual stock returns across emerging markets. Campbell et al. and Morck et al. have shown that the United States saw rising firm-specific stock return variations, and thus declining comovement, over the second half of the twentieth century. We detect a similar, albeit weaker, pattern in most, but not all, e...

We document a robust cross-sectional positive association across industries between a measure of the economic efficiency of corporate investment and the magnitude of firm-specific variation in stock returns. This finding is interesting for two reasons, neither of which is a priori obvious. First, it adds further support to the view that firm-specif...

ASEAN countries perceive the possible formation of the FTAA as a potential threat on the grounds that it may divert export markets and foreign direct investment (FDI) capital to the FTAA region. This effect, together with the "China factor" and the hangover from the 1997 financial crisis, posts a concern to the ASEAN countries' economic growth. We...

I modify the uniform-price auction rules in allowing the seller to ration bidders. This allows me to provide a strategic foundation for underpricing when the seller has an interest in ownership dispersion. Moreover, many of the so-called "collusive-seeming" equilibria disappear.

The value of mandatory securities disclosure is intensely debated. Two big questions occupy much of the attention: Do more accurate share prices contribute to the efficient provision of goods and services in the economy? Even if they do, will mandatory disclosure effectively contribute to share price accuracy? To date, the debate has been largely t...

Japan’s corporate sector has, at different times in recent history, been organized according to every major model. Prior to World War II, wealth Japanese families locked in their control over large corporations by organizing them into pyramidal groups, called zaibatsu, similar to structures currently found in Canada, France, Korea, Italy, and Swede...

Greater managerial ownership in family firms need not mitigate agency problems, especially when each family controls a group of publicly traded and private firms, as is the case in most countries. Such structures give rise to their own set of agency problems, as managers act for the controlling family, but not for shareholders in general. For examp...

Arguments for eliminating the double taxation of dividends apply only to dividends paid by corporations to individuals. The double (and multiple) taxation of dividends paid by one firm to another intercorporate dividends - was explicitly included in the 1930s to eliminate pyramidal corporate groups. These structures exist elsewhere, and are associa...

The small number of very large family-controlled corporate groups in many countries combined with their long continuity of control and ability to act discretely give these organizations a comparative advantage in political rent-seeking. This advantage is a key part of a self-reinforcing system whereby oligarchic family corporate control, political...

Roll [1988] observes low "R"-super-2 statistics for common asset pricing models due to vigorous firm-specific return variation not associated with public information. He concludes that this implies "either private information or else occasional frenzy unrelated to concrete information"[p. 56]. We show that firms and industries with lower market mod...

A peculiar pattern is evident across the stock markets of different countries. In emerging markets, such as Peru and China, all the stocks in the country tend to rise and fall together in the course of ordinary trading. But in developed countries, such as Denmark and Canada, stocks move independently. What seems to determine how independently a cou...

The efficient markets hypothesis implies that passive indexing should generate as high a return as active fund management. Indexing has been a very successful strategy. We document a large value premium in the average q ratios of firms in the S&P 500 index relative to the q ratios of other similar firms that appears in the mid 1980s and grows in st...

This paper examines the impact of governmental policies in influencing the path of internationalization of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It focuses on the role of institutions mandated to assist internationalization, as exemplified by Canada's Export Development Corporation (EDC). We illustrate and examine critically the role that gov...

We show that firms in industries in which firm-specific stock price variation is larger use more external financing and allocate capital with greater precision in the sense that their marginal q ratios are closer to one. According to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, greater firm-specific stock price variation reflects higher intensity firm-specifi...

Using U.S. steel firm data, we find that lobbying for import protection appears to be habit-forming. To identify heterogeneity in lobbying behavior among firms, we use an expectation-maximization algorithm to sort our firms into groups with different propensities to lobby and estimate the determinants of lobbying in each group. A two-pool model eme...

North American academics became interested in Japanese economic institutions in the 1980s, when rapidly growing Japanese firms were seizing significant shares of the global market (long dominated by established US and European firms) for cars, electronics, electrical and general machinery and precision instruments. Japan’s success seemed to many to...

Dans ce document, nous decrivons ce que les economistes savent, soupconnent et supposent au sujet des determinants de l'innovation. Nous evaluons les donnees disponibles en faisant ressortir les domaines ou des travaux supplementaires sont requis sans delai. Dans bien des cas, on ne peut tirer aucune conclusion ferme. Meme si le lecteur peut en res...

Stock prices move together more in poor economies than in rich economies. This finding is not due to market size and is only partially explained by higher fundamentals correlation in low-income economies. However, measures of property rights do explain this difference. The systematic component of returns variation is large in emerging markets, and...