This paper presents theory and evidence showing that institutional reforms in developing countries can effectively expand their product varieties in export. Our model demonstrates that relaxing foreign ownership controls and improving contract enforcement can induce multinational companies to...

The firm's stock of human capital is an important determinant of its ability to innovate. As such, any increase in this stock through firm-sponsored training might lead to more innovation. We test this hypothesis using detailed data on firms' human capital investments and innovation performance,...

Die künftige Entwicklung am Arbeitsmarkt ist von drei Megatrends geprägt: Einer Verlagerung unternehmerischer Verantwortung und Risiken auf Arbeitnehmer, steigenden fachlichen Qualifikationsanforderungen und einem drastischen Rückgang des Erwerbspersonenpotentials infolge des demographischen...

The costs of vertical integration are analyzed within a game-theoretic signaling model. It is shown that a company when being vertically integrated with a supplier may well decide to buy certain components from this supplier even at a lower quality than that offered by external sources. When the...

Recent thinking has emphasized the importance of consistency in a firm’s compensation policy. By starting from Williamson’s ideas about idiosyncratic exchange, this view can be supplied with some theoretical foundation. At the same time, the consistency view can be applied to a number of...

We argue that the measures of backward linkages used in recent papers on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic, as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions, namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as imported...