It has been recognized that the optimal strategy of a government is generally time-inconsistent: optimality requires that the government take into account expectations effects in the formulation of its policy and to ignore these effects when applying the policy. In order to analyse the problem,...

The paper analyzes a variety of government policies that can stimulate employment when unemployment is generated through the conflicting of interest between insiders and outsiders. It also provides guidelines for identifying policies that may be ineffective. We show how supply side policies can...

We evaluate the impact of firm-level corporate governance provisions on the valuation of firms in a large cross-section of countries. Unlike previous work, we distinguish between governance provisions that are set at the country-level and those that are adopted at the firm-level. We find that...

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that a fundamental shift in Europe, along with the other OECD countries, is taking place. This shift is from the managed economy to the entrepreneurial economy. While politicians and policy-makers have made a plea for guidance in the era of...

The paper constructs a simple macroeconomic model that contains a labor market in which insiders have power in wage negotiations. Wage and employment decisions are assumed to be made before business conditions are known; thus these decisions depend on both the hiring costs and expected dismissal...

The paper examines the determinants of the division of labour within firms. It provides an explanation of the pervasive change in work organization away from the traditional functional departments and towards multi-tasking and job rotation. Whereas the existing literature on the division of...

We depart from the trade and wages literature and its emphasis on North-South trade, examining North-North trade and linkages between trade-based integration and relative wages in an Etiher-type division of labor model. Using this model we identify a formal relationship between international...

Since Adam Smith's time, the division of labour in production has increased significantly, while information processing has become an important part of work. This paper examines whether the need to coordinate an increasingly complex division of labour has raised the demand for clerical office...

This paper provides some evidence that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the (local) market. We first propose a theoretical model. Its main prediction is that scarce occupations are over-represented in large cities. Using census data for French cities, we then provide strong...

We consider an endogenous growth model in which appropriate organization fosters innovation, but because of contractibility problems, this benefit cannot be internalized. The organizational design element we focus on is the division of labour, which as Adam Smith argued, facilitates invention by...