A Flexible Approach to Age Dependence in Organizational Mortality: Comparing the Life Duration for Cooperative and Non-Cooperative Enterprises Using a Bayesian Generalized Additive Discrete Time Survival Model

This paper proposes a new estimation model to capture the complex effect of age on organization survival. Testing various theoretical propositions on organizational mortality, we study the survival of French agricultural cooperatives in comparison with other firms with which they compete. The relationship between age and mortality in organizations is analyzed using a Bayesian Generalized discrete-time semi-parametric hazard model incorporating unobserved heterogeneity, isolating the various effects of time and identifying within-effects and between-effects of the time-varying covariates. This analysis emphasizes the specificity of the temporal dynamics of cooperatives in relation to their special role in agriculture.