Knowledge that Transforms

We survey 153 empirical studies of family firms and document 192 operational definitions representing 25 distinct definition types. These definitions can be decomposed into five recurring, codable dimensions: ownership, management, board representation, embeddedness, and succession. We relate these dimensions to economic mechanisms including agency conflicts, residual control rights, transaction costs, and dynastic control. Alternative definitions select systematically different populations and yield materially different estimates of firm performance and innovation. Definition choice is largely unrelated to the research question, except in succession studies. Ownership thresholds track private enforcement of self-dealing rules, but not statutory shareholder rights or rule of law. We conclude that the family firm is a family of related constructs rather than a single latent construct. Definitions should therefore match the family-firm construct implied by the research question, and results should be reported across alternative classification rules.

Digitalization is transforming the audit profession. Apprenticeship norms prescribe that knowledge flows down from supervisors to subordinates, but digitalization increasingly positions junior auditors as experts in emerging technology. Consequently, supervisors can learn from subordinates. This reversal challenges long-standing apprenticeship expectations, yet little is known about how it unfolds or the tensions it creates. Against this backdrop, we examine tensions that can arise when subordinate auditors share their knowledge with supervisors. Drawing on 51 semistructured interviews and guided by theory, we identify four recurring roadblocks to upward knowledge sharing: junior auditors' status motives, “same as last year” routines, status insecurity among immediate supervisors, and defensiveness when juniors cross perceived knowledge “lanes.” We also find a rare, countervailing pathway: the emergence of informal champions who legitimize junior auditors' contributions. Our study deepens understanding of how digitalization transforms team learning in audits and shows how historical structures and norms evolve under new conditions. Data Availability: Data were obtained from interviews.

We examine how corporate financial constraints shape firms’ employment responses to minimum wage policies. Exploiting the federal minimum wage increase during the financial crisis and variation in firms’ debt maturity structures at the crisis onset, we find that financially constrained firms significantly reduce employment. To assess external validity, we analyze staggered state-level minimum wage increases over time. Consistent with the crisis evidence, employment declines in establishments of constrained firms, whereas unconstrained firms expand in areas with a larger supply of minimum-wage workers and higher turnover. Our results highlight the central role of financial constraints in mediating labor policy effects.

We study how firms set wages for their employees when they can legally age-discriminate across workers. We exploit an age-specific minimum wage change in the UK, which raised the minimum applying to workers aged 25 and over, leaving unchanged the minima for younger workers. Using matched employer-employee data on a low-paying sector, we show large, positive wage spillovers on workers aged under 25, which arise within firms from company wage policy. Pay equity norms offer the most parsimonious explanation for the emergence of spillovers. The effects that we document also operate in other low-paying sectors of the UK labor market.

We study how supply disruptions interact with monopoly pricing, inventory management, and consumer stockpiling in a continuous-time model. Preemption incentives—consumers prefer to stock up before a price hike while the firm prefers to hike before consumers stock up—lead to an equilibrium with gradual stockpiling and endogenous uncertainty over the timing of a price hike, which can trigger a run at the disruption onset. Consumer storage introduces welfare losses from randomized pricing, but can also strengthen the firm’s incentive to hold buffer stock. Rationing, price controls, and reserve mandates can each improve welfare, but only strategic government reserves can implement the social optimum.