The paper analyses the contemporary organizational restructuring of production and work and derives some salient implications for the labour market. The analysis focuses on the switch from occupational specialization at 'Tayloristic' organizations to multi-tasking at 'holistic' organizations....

The lemons model assumes that owners of used cars have an informational advantage over potential buyers with respect to the quality of their vehicles. Owners of bad cars will try to sell them to unsuspecting buyers while owners of good cars will hold on to theirs. Consequently, the quality of...

This article introduces a method to quantify the effect of a firm’s strategic choices on the risk profile of its profits at different horizons. We combine a demand system for differentiated products with counterfactual paths of risk factors. Prices, costs and quantities respond endogenously to...

In markets with imperfect information and heterogeneity, the information technology affects the rate at which agents meet, which in turn affects the distribution of production technologies across firms. We show that in models for such markets there are typically multiple equilibria because...

Professional standards vary across professions and also change over time. One profession which has remained perfectionist is classical music, where the amount of practising is striking compared with other professions. Practising is a matter of increasing the reliability of ones skills rather...

Re-licensing requirements for professionals that move across borders are widespread. In this Paper, we measure the returns to an occupational license using novel data on Soviet trained physicians that immigrated to Israel. An immigrant re-training assignment rule used by the Israel Ministry of...

Exclusive dealing contracts between manufacturers and retailers force new entrants to set up their own costly dealer networks to enter the market. We ask whether such contracts may act as an entry barrier, and provide an empirical analysis of the European car market. We first estimate a demand...

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 examine the 'home bias' of international knowledge spillovers as measured by the speed of patent citations (i.e. knowledge spreads slowly over international boundaries). We present the first compelling econometric evidence that the geographical localization of knowledge spillovers has fallen...