The incomplete nature of contracts governing international transactions limits the extent to which the production process can be fragmented across borders. In a dynamic, general-equilibrium Ricardian model of North-South trade, the incompleteness of international contracts is shown to lead to...

Team size in scientific research and its geographic dispersion are important because research collaboration indicates the division of labor, and because collaboration is one channel of by which knowledge spills over. For both reasons, economic efficiency of the knowledge-creating industries is...

Shelling (1960) among others have argued that contributions to public goods may be larger if people spread their contributions and give one small contribution at a time. Examining a threshold public good environment, Marx and Matthews (2000) show that multiple rounds may secure a provision level...

Congress enacted The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 over the protests of small business advocates who claimed that the ADA would trigger a wave of bankruptcies. Although the profitability of firms may suffer from the costs of ADA compliance, no systematic evidence is available. This...

This paper studies the design of law-making and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure, defined as the socialwelfare loss that results from the regime's inability to...

This paper studies the strategic value of delegation in dynamic interactions, where principals provide managers with intertemporal incentives in order to obtain a competitive advantage. While direct management offers intertemporal commitment opportunities, the separation of ownership from...

Two main results have been obtained on the literature on contractual solutions to the hold-up problem. First, a contract specifying a price and quantity of the final good to be traded will, fairly generally, induce efficient investments if these are `selfish' in nature, i.e., each party's...

This paper develops a theory of outside ownership where such an ownership arrangement mitigates an external finance problem. Part of the gains from outside ownership accrue to asset owners which determines the asset value. The theory provides a context to analyze asset ownership and asset values...

The objective of this paper is to add evidence of job mobility within a firm using personnel records from a single large U.S. corporation, focusing on the determinants of the hazard rates of being promoted to a higher hierarchy level. How to successfully control for unobserved heterogeneity is...

Most existing theories of the firms define a firm as a collection of physical assets, and hence can not explain the firm from a human-asset perspective, which is of particular importance for understanding human-capital intensive firms. To fill in the gap, this paper proposes an alternative...