Better managers and managerial practices lead to better firm performance. Yet, little is known about what happens when managers move across firms. Does a firm hiring a good manager improve its performance? If yes is there some valuable knowledge the manager has acquired and successfully diffused...

This paper examines a life-cycle cost concept that applies to both manufacturing and service industries in which upfront capacity investments are essential. Borrowing from the energy literature, we refer to this cost measure as the levelized product cost (LC). Per unit of output, the levelized...

This paper studies the causal effect of technology and knowledge transfers on early industrial development. Between 1950 and 1957, the Soviet Union supported the "156 Projects" in China for building technologically advanced industrial facilities. We exploit idiosyncratic delays in project...

Following Garicano (2000), we consider groups whose members decide what knowledge to acquire and how to use this knowledge in production. If efficient production requires common knowledge, all group members should become workers and acquire common knowledge. But if efficient production requires...

This paper analyses the effect of a firm’s organizational capacity on the reported profitability of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Better organizational practices improve productivity and the potential taxable profits of firms. However, higher adoption of these practices may also enable...

This paper studies how a firm should make pricing and transparency decisions when consumers care about supply chain characteristics. We first show how preferences that account for price and unit cost constrain the firm’s pricing power and profit. Surprisingly, we find that the firm may be...

This paper explores the connection between tenant riskiness, commercial lease length and the term structure of lease contracts. Theory shows that the possibility of default on a long-term lease generates a risk/lease-length connection. The empirical work uses a large CompStak lease dataset...

We identify a puzzling management practice gap in China. In the South, a one standard deviation increase in firms' management competency is associated with a 7.5 percent improvement in sales productivity and a 29.2 increase in profitability. But such associations are muted for firms located in...

The paper compares two state-of-art but very dinstinct methods used in macroeconomics: rational-expectations DSGE and bounded rationality behavioural models. Both models are extended to include a financial friction on the supply side.The result in both models is that production, supply of credit...

We compare the numerical methods that are most widely applied in the computation of the standard business cycle model with flexible labor. The numerical techniques imply economically insignificant differences with regard to business cycle summary statistics except for the volatility of...