One of the most intriguing and influential questions in organizational theory is ¡°who monitors the monitor?¡± A theory of ownership is proposed by Alchian and Demsetz in answer to this question. In this paper, a model of successive monitoring is constructed to show that, when it is feasible...

Up-or-out contracts can improve human capital investment incentives but lead to suboptimal worker-employer separation. When job matching uncertainty is large relative to the return to human capital investment, spot contracts Pareto dominate up-or-out contracts. Otherwise, up-or-out contracts are...

This paper develops a general framework to analyze the relationship between a firm's capital structure and its product market strategy and presents a taxonomy of whether debt makes a firm {\it tough} or {\it soft} in product market competition and how strategic considerations affect the leverage...

We study coordination in organizations with a variety of organizational forms. Coordination in organization is modeled as the adjustment of attributes and capacities of tasks when facing external shocks. An M-form (U-form) organization groups complementary (substitutable) tasks together in one...