Recent theoretical contributions provide conflicting predictions about the effects of product market competition on firms' organizational choices. This paper uses a rich firm-product-level panel data set of Indian manufacturing firms to analyze the relationship between import competition and...

Headquarters and their specialized component suppliers have a vital interest in establishing long-term collaborations. When formal contracts are not enforceable, such efficiency-enhancing cooperations can be established via informal agreements, but relational contracts have been largely ignored...

This study investigates induced productivity effects of firms introducing new environmental technologies. The literature on within-firm organisational change and productivity suggests that firms can achieve higher productivity gains from adopting new technologies if they adapt their...

We develop a theory of a firm in an incomplete contracts environment which decides on the complexity, the organization, and the global scale of its production process. Specifically, the firm decides i) how many intermediate inputs are simultaneously combined to a final product, ii) if the...

We consider a property rights model of a firm with two heterogeneous suppliers. The headquarters determine the firm's organizational structure, and we analyze which sourcing mode (outsourcing or vertical integration) is chosen for which of the asymmetric inputs. If suppliers' investment choices...

When Apple entered the ebook market, prices rose. A recent court decision found Apple guilty of colluding with publishers, blaming the price hike, in part, on agency agreements and prohibiting their use. Building a model to compare these with traditional wholesale agreements, we identify a...

Organizational decisions in multistage production processes are often not made by the downstream headquarter firm, but by the various intermediate inputs suppliers along the value chain themselves. We assume a production process with one headquarter (final good producer) and two suppliers at...

In this paper, we consider a dynamic search-and-matching problem of a firm with its intermediate input supplier. In our model, a headquarter currently matched with a supplier, has an interest to find and collaborate with a more efficient partner. However, supplier switching through search and...

The paper provides empirical evidence for the causal impact of broadband Internet on firms' labour productivity and realised process and product innovations. The analysis refers to the early phase of DSL expansion in Germany from 2001 to 2003, when roughly 60 percent of the German firms already...

We study the timing of new technology adoption in markets with input outsourcing, and thus with vertical relations. We find that technology adoption can take place earlier when firms engage in input outsourcing than when they produce the input in-house. Hence, the presence of vertical relations...