Plant locations in the U.S. auto industry have been moving southward for some time now. This paper utilizes a comprehensive dataset of the U.S. auto industry and focuses on plant location decisions of auto supplier plants that were opened less than 15 years ago in the U.S. We find that...

The introduction of a new manufacturing system provides a unique opportunity to analyze its effects on the governance structure of vertical relationships. This paper focuses on the possible effects of lean manufacturing on the decision to vertically integrate. Transaction cost theory provides...

This paper studies how managers at automobile assembly plants organize production across time. Detailed data from eleven single-source automobile assembly plants display considerable cross-plant heterogeneity. At plants which make low- and medium-selling vehicles the capital stock often sits...

This paper investigates the issue of geographic concentration for the auto supplier industry by means of a large plant-level data set representing information for the year 1997. The industry continues to be highly spatially concentrated, even though its core region has changed over the last few...