This paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine lawfirms' field boundaries. We find that the share of lawyers working in field-specializedfirms increases as market size increases and lawyers field-specialize, indicating thattransaction costs among lawyers, and not...

An organization will often use a specialized technical language that is un-derstood by its members but not by others. We develop a theory of optimalorganizational languages and identify a key trade-o¤ between facilitatinginternal communication and encouraging communication with other...

Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the“information” and “communication” components together. We show theoretically and empirically thatthese have very different effects on the empowerment of employees, and by extension on wageinequality....

Welfare to work policy is central to British reforms of itswelfare state and social security system. We are not alonein our desire to assist unemployed and other claimants tofind and retain work. It is therefore important to be able tolook to other countries and consider lessons that could...

Large companies are usually organized into business units, yet some activitiesare almost always centralized in a company-wide functional unit. We firstshow that organizations endogenously create an incentive conflict between functionalmanagers (who desire excessive standardization) and...

We present an equilibrium theory of the organization of work in an economywhere knowledge is an essential input in production and agents are heterogeneousin skill. Agents organize production by matching with others in knowledgehierarchies designed to use and communicate their knowledge...

The knowledge economy is nothing new. As Chandler’s (1977) classic study documents,improvements in communication technology (e.g. mail via railways, thetelegraph, and later the telephone) played a key role in the emergence of the modernAmerican corporation in the late 19th century and the...

How does the formation of cross-country teams affect the organization of workand the structure of wages? To study this question, we propose a theory of theassignment of heterogeneous agents into hierarchical teams, where less skilledagents specialize in production and more skilled agents...

Earnings inequality has increased substantially since the 1970s. Using evidence changes from con…dential Census data on U.S. law offices on lawyers'organization and earnings, we study the extent to which the mechanism suggested by Lucas (1978) and Rosen (1982), a scale of operations effect...