Showing 1 - 10 of 10,469
What is the role of firms and markets in mediating the division of labour? This Paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine law firms' boundaries. We first examine how the specialization of lawyers and firms increases as lawyers' returns to specialization increase....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005123527
Hierarchies allow individuals to leverage their knowledge through others' time. This mechanism increases productivity and amplifies the impact of skill heterogeneity on earnings inequality. To quantify this effect, we analyze the earnings and organization of U.S. lawyers and use the equilibrium...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005136470
How does information technology (IT) affect the organization of police work? How does it in turn affect police crime-fighting effectiveness? To answer these questions, we construct a new panel data set of police departments covering 1987-2003. We find that while IT adoption had substantial...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005792143
A code is a technical language that members of an organization learn in order to communicate among themselves and with members of other organizations. What are the features of an optimal code and how does it interact with the characteristics of the organization? This Paper develops a simple...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005792432
Organizational economics has advanced along two parallel tracks, one concerned with motivating agents with diverging objectives, the other--less developed--with coordinating agents under cognitive limits. This survey focuses on the second strand and attempts to bring the two strands together....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009002388
Organizations fail due to incentive problems (agents do not want to act in the organization's interests) and bounded rationality problems (agents do not have the necessary information to do so). This survey uses recent advances in organizational economics to illuminate organizational failures...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011165668
We exploit an incentive change in professional soccer leagues aimed at encouraging more attacking and goal scoring to obtain evidence on the effect of stronger incentives on productive and destructive effort. Using as control the behavior of the same teams in a competition that experienced no...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005114301
Multi-product firms create value by integrating functional activities such as manufacturing across business units. This integration often requires making functional managers responsible for implementing standardization, thereby limiting business-unit managers’ authority. Realizing synergies...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005114409
We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies this to France where many labor laws start to bind on firms with exactly 50 or more employees....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011083258
The economy is experiencing a large shift towards professional services. Markets for these services are characterized by large information asymmetries: the difficulty in providing the necessary advice, the quality of the advice, and whether a problem is solved may all be unobservable. Our...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011083990