This paper develops a new analystical approach to the old question whether market conditions may influence the internal efficiency of firms. The basic textbook model of the firm is slightly extended to incorporate managers' incentives to reduce production costs in an imperfectly competitive...

This paper develops a new analytical approach to the old question whether market conditions may influence the internal efficiency of firms. The basic textbook model of the firm is slightly extended to incorporate managers' incentives to reduce production costs in an imperfectly competitive...

Investigating the robustness of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis, this analysis incorporates two novel features. First, effective labor is modeled as the product of a quantity measure - number of employees with a given level of education - and a quality index, depending on, i.a.,...