Conference Paper

Vintage organization capital

Abstract: We argue that a firm's organization capital depends on the state of technology when the firm was born and on the technologies that have followed. We estimate vintage effects on the value of firms from 114 years of stock market data. We find: 1) a surprisingly strong upward trend in the stock-market share of the largest firms, 2) a very large quantity of organization capital created by the 1920's vintage, 3) strong indications that the 1970's and 1980's vintages will be followed by more complementary technologies, and 4) major technological change since WW2 in the process by which organization capital is created.

Keywords: Corporations; Technology;

Status: Published in Irrational exuberance? : a conference (2000: April 21)

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Part of Series: Proceedings

Publication Date: 2000

Issue: Apr