This paper models payment evasion as a source of profit by letting the firm choose the purchase price and the fine imposed on detected payment evaders. For a given price and fine, the consumers purchase, evade payment, or choose the outside option. We show that payment evasion leads to a form of...

Globalization has been identified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities. This Paper surveys recent work that examines the role of trade integration between similar and dissimilar countries for these changes in corporate organization. It is shown that international...

This paper investigates how patent applications and grants held by new ventures improve their ability to attract venture capital (VC) financing. We argue that investors are faced with considerable uncertainty and therefore rely on patents as signals when trying to assess the prospects of...

The design of optimal immigration policy, particularly in the face of the spiraling demand for highly skilled workers, such as IT workers and engineers, is a topical issue in the policy debate as well as the economic literature. In this paper, we present empirical evidence from firm-level data...

This Paper surveys the theoretical literature on the effect of soft budget constraints (SBC) on economies in transition from centralization to capitalism; it also reviews our understanding of SBC in general. It focuses on the conception of the SBC syndrome as a commitment problem. We show that...

This Paper works with a broad data sample of Czech voucher-privatized firms during 1996-99. It analyses the development of ownership structure and consequently its effect on a firm's performance Ownership concentration had been quite high in 1996 and steadily increased. The single largest owner...

Australia’s productivity performance is characterized by important differences across continuing firms, frequent entry of new firms, and substantial exit of firms which, for one reason or another, decide to cease production. These basic facts call into question the appropriateness of measuring...

We analyse the principal objectives and constraints of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), using data from a survey of 437 top managers (CEOs) of SMEs in Russia and Bulgaria. The CEOs display similar views and identify a small number of specific constraints as being the most important ones. The...

Major technological, regulatory, and institutional changes have made finance more widely available in recent years, amounting to a bona fide ‘financial revolution’. In this article, we focus on the impact the financial revolution has had on the way firms are (or should be) organized and...

This paper studies the choice of organizational forms in a multi-task principal-agent model. We compare a functional organization in which the firm is organized into functional departments such as marketing and R&D to a product-based organization in which the firm is organized into product...