ORGANIZATIONAL MORTALITY IN EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRIES PART I - REVISITING THE EFFECTS OF AGE AND SIZE

Recent research on organizational mortality controls for the effect of age-varying organizational size and yields divergent results. Some st udies find that ageing lowers mortality rates; others find the opposit e pattern. We argue that this divergence reflects partly an overly sim ple specification of the effects of age and size. We argue that the ef fects of size on mortality rates differ by age group. Using complete d ata on organizational populations of automobile manufacturers in Brita in, France, Germany, and the United States, we find that specification s with such age-variation improve over the usual specifications. The r esults for the American, French, and German populations indicate that age dependence is negative for the largest organizations and positive for small ones. The pattern is the reverse in the British population.