The decisions of firms on investment and hiring play a crucial role in business cycle fluctuations. This paper explores their dynamic behavior in the presence of frictions. It does so within a unified framework, stressing their mutual dependence and placing the emphasis on their joint,...

We use a natural experiment in the form of 121 staggered changes in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states to show that tax considerations are a first-order determinant of firms' capital structure choices. Over the period 1990-2011, firms increase long-term leverage by 104 basis points on...

A recent literature has introduced heterogeneous firms into models of international trade. This literature has adopted the convention of treating individual firms as points on a continuum. While the continuum offers many advantages this convenience comes at some cost: (1) Shocks to individual...

How does increasing globalization affect corporate transparency? Freer trade represents different facets and in theory has ambiguous effects on corporate transparency. On the one hand, by exposing firms to more product market competition, it could discourage discretionary disclosure. On the...

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly chosen...

We use a unique dataset of more than 1,000 Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Chief Financial Officers around the world to investigate the degree to which executives delegate financial decisions and the circumstances that drive variation in delegation. Delegation does not appear to be...

This comment on the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) draft Strategic Plan FY 2014-FY 2018 addresses two areas that the Commission should consider. First, the Commission should integrate economic analysis into its consumer protection mission to the same degree that it has into its competition...

Foreign-owned firms from advanced countries carry the culture of transparency in business transactions that is orthogonal to the culture of hiding and insider dealing in many developing economies and economies in transition. In this paper, we document this using administrative data on reported...

The article examines the nature, role and place of the concept of business enterprise architecture and its relationship with strategic management of modern company. Based on in-depth critical analysis of the leading views on business architecture, the author gives his definition of business...

The paper investigates the change in strategy of the Benetton Group, since the mid nineties, in face of the severe intensive competition in the international fashion market. New competitors, in particular the European brands Zara, Mango and H&M, have challenged the Benetton position in the...