In recent decades, a large and increasing number of leading firms in a diverse set of industries have faced allegations of ‘unethical' practices along their international value chains. In many cases this has triggered consumer boycotts and NGO campaigns, introducing a new link between upstream...

Management research has long focused on the theory of the firm, studying for-profit organizations that produce privately owned resources based on central authority and within well-defined boundaries. In recent times, a new kind of enterprise has emerged that we call Community Enterprises. They...

According to conventional wisdom, multinational firms undertake vertical FDI in order to take advantage of cross-border factor cost differences and source the inputs from abroad at better terms. Recent empirical findings though document that this is not always the case. We provide theoretical...

We investigate the link between productivity of firms and their sourcing behavior. Following Antràs & Helpman (2004) we distinguish between domestic and foreign sourcing, as well as between outsourcing and vertical integration. A firm's choice is driven by a hold-up problem caused by lack of...

This paper investigates the role of firm productivity in drawing firm boundaries in global sourcing. Our analysis focuses on how productivity affects the allocation of ownership rights between the headquarter of a firm and an intermediate input supplier (vertical integration vs. outsourcing), as...

We show that team formation can serve as an implicit commitment device to overcome problems of self-control. In a situation where individuals have present-biased preferences, any effort that is costly today but rewarded at some later point in time is too low from the perspective of an...

We investigate the link between productivity of firms and their sourcing behavior. Following Antràs & Helpman (2004) we distinguish between domestic and foreign sourcing, as well as between outsourcing and vertical integration. A firm’s choice is driven by a hold-up problem caused by lack of...

This paper investigates the role of firm productivity in drawing firm boundaries in global sourcing. Our analysis focuses on how productivity affects the allocation of ownership rights between the headquarter of a firm and an intermediate input supplier (vertical integration vs. outsourcing), as...

We show that team formation can serve as an implicit commitment device to overcome problems of self-control. In a situation where individuals have present-biased preferences, any effort that is costly today but rewarded at some later point in time is too low from the perspective of an...

We develop a theory of a firm in an incomplete contracts environment which decides on its complexity, organization, and global scale. Specifically, the firm decides i) how thinly it wants to slice its production process by choosing the mass of symmetric intermediate inputs that are...