Applying the Monti-Klein framework, we examine the optimal financing strategy of a fi rm that requires funding for individual projects at an imperfect credit market. In particular, we study under which circumstances the firm should raise debt for projects separately (decentralized funding) or...

I study the interaction between optimal procurement and outsourcing of production in small industries. First, two sellers decide about outsourcing. By outsourcing, a seller loses information about the costs of producing to his supplier. Then the buyer designs the procurement mechanism and...

Consumption patterns can be indicative of how a consumer wants to be perceived by others. In this paper, I study markets where consumers are heterogeneous with respect to both their concerns for the quality of goods and the image associated with buying them. Consumers with a taste for quality...

The longer an agent is employed in a job, the more the principal will have learned about his ability through the history of performance. With implicit incentives, influence perceptions and effort incentives decrease over time. Rotating agents to a different job deletes learning effects about...

In this paper we are able to analyze firms' entry decision into the export market. In contrast to previous studies it is possible to control for the effects of management characteristics and human capital variables, besides commonly used firm characteristics. We first motivate our empirical...

This paper looks inside the firm and investigates how trade alters the matching of worker-specific abilities and task-specific requirements. The outcome of this matching depends on how firms organize their recruitment process and how much they invest into the screening of applicants. In the open...

We investigate dynamic coordination among members of a problem-solving team who receive private signals about which of their actions are required for a (static) coordinated solution and who have repeated opportunities to explore different action combinations. In this environment ordinal...

Managers like to think well of themselves, and of the firms that employ them. However, positive illusions can bias a manager's evaluation of market outcomes, self-servingly crediting success on the superior quality of one's own product but blaming failure on the aggressive price of a...

This paper studies the effect of trade facilitation on vertical firm structure using plant-level data from Switzerland. Based on the Business Census and the Input-Output table, we first calculate a binary measure of vertical integration for all plants registered in Switzerland. We then estimate...

We incorporate trade in tasks l a Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) into the international trade theory of fi rm organization of Marin and Verdier (2012) to examine how off shoring aff ects the way fi rms organize. We test the predictions of the model based on firm level data of 660 Austrian...