How valuable are long-term supplier relationships? To address this question, this paper explores relationships between U.S. importers and their suppliers abroad. We first establish several facts: almost half of U.S. imports are in relationships three years or older, relationship survival and...

This paper estimates a New Keynesian model with new and old behavioral elements. Agents in the model exhibit cognitive discounting, or myopia: they discount variables far into the future at higher rates than typically implied in the benchmark model. We investigate the model under different...

Ronald W. Jones (2000) celebrated book has inspired a generation of work that has been devoted to understanding the causes and consequences of outsourcing. While much of this work has focused on the outsourcing versus domestic production decision of the firm with labor cost-saving as the key...

This paper analyzes to what extent gender culture affects gender gap in employment. Drawing on Italian data, we measure culture by building two indices: one based on individual attitudes, as done in the existing literature; one based on firms' attitudes. Firms' beliefs, which express their set of...

I analyze a model in which a principal offers a contract to an agent and can influence the agent’s marginal return of effort by the choice of the project mission. The principal's and the agents' mission preferences are misaligned, and the agents have unobservable intrinsic motivation levels. I...

Corporate success stories often resemble a snowball. We show how initial luck in hiring talented people, the resulting technological advantage, superior corporate culture, and statusseeking by workers and by consumers can make small initial differences generate large differences over time.

Corporate scandals, reflected in excessive management compensation and fraudulent accounts, cause considerable damage. Agency theory’s insistence on linking the compensation of managers and directors as closely as possible to firm performance is a major reason for these scandals. They cannot...

We examine both theoretically and empirically how migration affects cultural change in home and host countries. Our theoretical model integrates various compositional and cultural transmission mechanisms of migration-based cultural change for which it delivers distinctive testable predictions on...

Effective organizations are able not only to coordinate their members on efficient strategies but also to adapt members' strategies to unforeseen change in an efficient manner. We explore whether part of organizational culture - namely, relational contracts that facilitate both coordination and...

What happens when immigrant girls are given increased opportunities to integrate into the workplace and society, but their parents value more traditional cultural outcomes? Building on Akerlof and Kranton's identity framework (2000), we construct a simple theoretical model which shows how...