We have conducted the first survey on management practices in transition countries. We found that Central Asian transition countries, such as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, have on average very poor management practices. Their average scores are below emerging countries such as Brazil, China and...

We apply program evaluation methods to analyze the effectiveness of two types of preferential regional policy programs in China's manufacturing sector. Economic and Technological Development Zones (ETDZs) aim to facilitate firms' internationalization strategies. Science and Technology Industrial...

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....

We examine the differential effects of financial status and exporting activity on the likelihood of survival for firms in the UK and France - two countries with different financial systems. We aim to answer two main questions: What is the direct impact of financial characteristics and different...

We present a model in which the owner of the firm enjoys a private benefit from developing a personal relationship with the executives. This may lead the owner to retain a senior executive in office even though a more productive replacement is available. The model shows that the private returns...

A principal chooses one of n=2 projects or an outside option. An agent is privately informed about the projects' benefits and shares the principal's preferences except for not internalizing her value from the outside option. We show that strategic communication is characterized by pandering: the...

We exploit time variation in the degree of development of local credit markets and matched employer-employee data to assess the role of the firm as an internal credit market. In less developed local credit markets firms can offer a flatter wage-tenure profile than firms in more developed credit...

We study managerial incentives in a model where managers take not only product market but also take-over decisions. We show that the optimal contract includes an incentive to increase the firm's sales, under both quantity and price competition. This result contrasts with the previous literature,...

We use a new longitudinal data set of more than 15,000 Chinese manufacturing plants to show that the direct and indirect effects of foreign direct investment on measured firm level productivity depend on a number of firm specific features and institutional factors. We find that domestic firms...