We use US regional and state data to determine which regions have contributed most to the apparent decline in income growth volatility in the United States. We study changes in the variance of income growth in each region, changes in the covariance of growth between regions and changes in...

In a typical corporate hierarchy, the manager is delegated the authority to make strategic decisions, and to contract with other employees. By studying a model with one principal and two agents where one agent can gather information that is valuable for the principal's project choice and the...

This paper studies internal organization of a firm using an incomplete contracting approach `a la Grossman-Hart-Moore and Aghion-Tirole. The two key ingredients of our model are externalities among tasks that require coordination, and investment in task-specific human capital. We compare three...

A perfect-competition model is developed to analyze duality in specialization and technology such as in the men’s clothing industry, an industry with highly seasonal nature of the business cycle. We show that when the market fluctuation is large enough, some firms will specialize in one...

In a typical corporate hierarchy, the manager is delegated the authority to make strategic decisions, and to contract with other employees. We study when such delegation can be optimal. In centralization, the owner retains the authority, which fails to motivate the manager to acquire valuable...

This paper investigates how the trade-off between organization costs, transaction costs and economies of specialization may affect the way public goods are provided. In doing so, it considers two ways of providing a public good. One is collective provision where users organize themselves to...

This paper studies the information transmission aspect of influence activities within an organization where privately informed division managers strategically communicate divisional information to headquarters to influence its capital allocation decisions. Although costly, influence activities...

This research proposes that, in cases where threshold covariates are either unavailable or difficult to observe, practitioners should treat these characteristics as latent, and use simulated maximum likelihood techniques to control for them. Two econometric frameworks for doing so in a more...

In this paper we quantify the impact of model mis-specification on the properties of parameter estimators applied to fractionally integrated processes. We demonstrate the asymptotic equivalence of four alternative parametric methods: frequency domain maximum likelihood, Whittle estimation, time...