We conduct a randomized experiment in Sri Lanka to measure the impact of the most commonly used business training course in developing countries, the Start-and-Improve Your Business (SIYB) program. In contrast to existing business training evaluations which are restricted to microfinance...

This paper sheds light on how changes in the organization of work can help to understand increasing wage inequality. We present a theoretical model in which workers with a wider span of competence (higher level of multitasking) earn a wage premium. Since abilities and opportunities to expand the...

What type of businesses do unions target for organizing? A dynamic model of the union organizing process is constructed to answer this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity and decides which ones to organize and when. An establishment becomes...

Recent studies indicate that firms often outsource standard and simple tasks, while keeping complex and important inputs inside their boundaries. This observation is difficult to reconcile with the property rights approach of the firm, which suggests that important components should be...

How to design compensation schemes to motivate team members appears to be one of the most challenging problems in the economic analysis of labour provision. We shed light on this issue by experimentally investigating team-based compensations with and without bonuses awarded to the highest...

This paper analyses the effect of foreign acquisition on survival probability and employment growth of target plant using data on Swedish manufacturing plants during the period 1993-2002. An improvement over previous studies is that we take into account firm level heterogeneity by separating the...

We develop a theory of a firm in an environment with incomplete contracts. The firm’s headquarter decides on the complexity, the organization, and the global scale of its production process. Specifically, it decides: i) on the mass of symmetric intermediate inputs that are part of the value...

The paper analyzes the contemporary organizational restructuring of production and work within firms. We emphasize the shift from a Tayloristic organization of work (characterized by significant specialization by tasks) to a holistic organization (featuring job rotation, integration of tasks and...

In this paper we study job design. Will an organization plan precisely how the job is to be done ex ante, or ask workers to determine the process as they go? We first model this decision and predict complementarity between these job attributes: multitasking, discretion, skills, and...

France has experienced massive changes in its regulation of working time during the last decade. These changes generate natural experiments that may help to study a variety of issues in labor economics, including work sharing effect on job creation or productivity, labor relations or adaptation...