There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open...

We present quantitative and qualitative evidence (field research) on university technology transfer offices (TTOs). These offices negotiate licensing agreements with firms to commercialize university-based technologies. A stochastic frontier production function framework is used to assess the...

When should a government provide a service inhouse and when should it contract out provision? We develop a model in which the provider can invest in improving the quality of service or reducing cost. If contracts are incomplete, the private provider has a stronger incentive to engage in both...

Local governments can provide services with their own employees or by contracting with private or public sector providers. We develop a model of this "make-or-buy" choice that highlights the trade-off between productive efficiency and the costs of contract administration. We construct a dataset...

In the first part of this paper we argue that three reforms must be implemented if privatization is to increase efficiency. First, establishing unitary control rights within the firm. Second, making privatized firms face hard budget constraints. Third, establishing a non-corruptible judicial...

The foundations of incomplete contracts have been questioned using or extending the subgame perfect implementation approach of Moore and Repullo (1988). We consider the robustness of subgame perfect implementation to the introduction of small amounts of asymmetric information. We show that...

Contractual theories of vertical integration derive firm boundaries as an efficient response to market transaction costs. These theories predict a relationship between underlying features of transactions and observed integration decisions. There has been some progress in testing these...

Explaining patterns of asset ownership in the economy is a central goal of both organizational economics and industrial organization. We develop a model of asset ownership in trucking, which we test by examining how the adoption of different classes of on-board computers (OBCs) between 1987 and...