IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oxf/wpaper/2003-fe-02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Partnership Firms, Reputation and Human Capital

Author

Listed:
  • Alan Morrison
  • William Wilhelm

Abstract

In human capital intensive industries where it is difficult to contract upon the training effort of skilled agents a socially suboptimal level of training may occur. We show how partnership organisations can overcome this problem by tying human and financial capital. Partnerships are opaque so that the willingness of clients to pay depends upon reputation. Partnerships are illiquid and partners must stay with the firm until clients discover their type and update the firm`s reputation. This renders unskilled agents, who will aversely affect reputation, unwilling to accept partnerships. Skilled agents therefore train the next generation so as to ensure that there is an adequate market for their own shares. We comment upon the salient differences between partnerships and joint stock firms.

Suggested Citation

  • Alan Morrison & William Wilhelm, 2003. "Partnership Firms, Reputation and Human Capital," Economics Series Working Papers 2003-FE-02, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:2003-fe-02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c707b0d4-a1b8-42a0-9236-720d7c37b1d2
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bharat N. Anand & Alexander Galetovic & Alvaro Stein, 2004. "Incentives Versus Synergies in Markets for Talent," Documentos de Trabajo 179, Centro de Economía Aplicada, Universidad de Chile.
    2. Demirguc-Kunt, Asli & Love, Inessa & Maksimovic, Vojislav, 2006. "Business environment and the incorporation decision," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 30(11), pages 2967-2993, November.
    3. Morrison, Alan & Wilhelm Jr, William J, 2005. "The Demise of Investment Banking Partnerships: Theory and Evidence," CEPR Discussion Papers 4904, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    4. Heski Bar-Isaac, 2004. "Something to Prove: Reputation in teams and hiring to introduce uncertainty," Working Papers 04-07, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Partnership; on-the-job training; human capital; collective reputation.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • J41 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Labor Contracts
    • L14 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Transactional Relationships; Contracts and Reputation
    • L22 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Organization and Market Structure

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:2003-fe-02. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Anne Pouliquen (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfeixuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.