How does the formation of cross-country teams affect the organization of work and the structure of wages? To study this question, we propose a theory of the assignment of heterogeneous agents into hierarchical teams, where less skilled agents specialize in production and more skilled agents...

We study the impact of private ownership, incentive pay, and local development objectives on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology‐licensing offices using new survey information together with panel data on U.S. universities for...

We present evidence from a firm level experiment in which we engineered an exogenous change in managerial compensation from fixed wages to performance pay based on the average productivity of lower-tier workers. Theory suggests that managerial incentives affect both the mean and dispersion of...

This paper examines the role of hierarchies in the organization of human‐capital‐intensive production. We develop an equilibrium model of hierarchical organization and provide empirical evidence based on confidential data on thousands of law offices. The equilibrium assignment of individuals...

This article illustrates how contracts are completed ex post in practice and, in so doing, indirectly suggests what the real function of contracts may be. Our evidence comes from the contracts between automobile manufacturers and their dealers in 23 dealership networks in Spain. Franchising...

We document the establishment and evolution of a cooperative norm among workers using evidence from a natural field experiment on a leading UK farm. Workers are paid according to a relative incentive scheme under which increasing individual effort raises a worker's own pay but imposes a negative...

Support for many R&D and technology policies relies on empirical evidence that R&D ‘spills over’ between firms. But there are two countervailing R&D spillovers: positive effects from technology spillovers and negative effects from business stealing by product market rivals. We develop a...

We study the impact of incentive pay, local development objectives and government constraints on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices, using new survey information together with panel data on U.S. universities for...

This paper develops a framework for evaluating the social returns to infrastructure investments that intensify product market competition. We use a circular model with asymmetric production costs both for incumbent firms and potential entrants, where unit transport cost measures the intensity of...

This paper presents a simple model for analysing the contribution of investments in physical and institutional infrastructure to the transition process. In addition to the direct cost savings, infrastructure investment generates important indirect effects, or transition impacts. The model shows...