Many new firms are started by entrepreneurs who got the idea while working for their previous employer. Sometimes employers also agree to develop their employees' ideas internally. This paper develops a multi-task incentives model to analyze optimal corporate strategies towards employee...

Interest groups seek to influence economic activity through public and private politics. Public politics takes place in the arenas of public institutions, whereas private politics takes place outside public institutions often in the arena of public sentiment. Private politics refers to action by...

This paper provides an empirical test of a theory that relates corporate financial performance (CFP), corporate social performance (CSP), and social pressure from government and social activist for improved social performance. A three-equation structural model is estimated for a large number of...

This paper provides a theory of firm behavior motivated by moral duty, self-interest, and social pressure. A morally-managed and a self-interested firm compete in a market in which their corporate social performance (CSP) provides product differentiation. In addition to acting as consumers,...

Policy-making is a dynamic process in which policies can be changed in each period but continue in the absence of new legislation. We study a dynamic legislative bargaining game with an endogenous status quo where in each period a dollar is allocated with a proposal voted against the allocation...

Pubic policies such as reguation, antitrust, and international trade are the result of public politics--a competition over who gets what with government the arbiter of that competition. Policies are also chosen by private parties without the command or sanction of government. Private policies...

This paper presents a positive theory of corporate social responsibility set in a managerial capitalism context in which managers instead of markets allocate resources, including social expenditures. The theory focuses jointly on the operational management of the firm and on its social...

This paper provides a new explanation for the use of convertible securities in venture capital, which is based on the trade-off between acquisition or IPOs. A key property of convertible preferred equity is that it allocates different cash flow rights, depending on whether exit occurs by...

Most theories of the firm ignore the entrepreneurial process of how the various resources of the firm are combined in the first place. This paper examines the process of how an entrepreneur obtains commitments from multiple resource providers to create a new venture. Resource providers may be...

Much of the recent growth and development literature is based on the notion that economies may exhibit multiple equilibria. An economy may get stuck in a vicious circle of poverty as a result of a coordination failure. Little attention has been given to which economic institutions may solve such...