Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström were awarded the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their fundamental contributions to contract theory. This article offers a short summary and discussion of their path breaking work.

This paper studies organizations with autocratic decisionmaking.

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 uncer-tainty and therefore rely on patents as signals when trying to assess the prospects of...

The existing literature identifies patent thickets indirectly. In this paper we propose a novel measure based on patent citations which allows us to measure the density of patent thickets directly. We discuss the algorithm which generates the measure and present descriptive results validating...

Over the last few years, worldwide mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have increasedsharply both in terms of value and volume. This development has not only beendriven by corporate acquirers but also to an increasing extent by private equityinvestors. In this paper, we analyze differences in...

Our paper analyzes the interplay of organizational demography with the propensity to adopt an innovative practice. In particular, we examine how the demographical composition of professional German football teams influenced the adoption of the chain-defense-system (?Viererkette?) as well as the...

Social capital is defined as the shared knowledge, trust, and culture, embodied in the structural forms of networks and other stable inter-agent relationships. Social capital has been shown to be more difficult to build than economic capital, and to have greater beneficial effects for community...

This paper investigates the impact of labour force composition on productivity in EU arable farming. We test for heterogeneous effects of family and hired labour for a set of five EU member states. To this end, we estimate augmented production functions using FADN data for the years 2001-2008....

This paper investigates the job satisfaction in relation to managerial attitudes towards employees and firm size using the linked employer-employee survey results in Britain.We first investigate the management-employee relationships and the firm size using maximum likelihood probit estimation....

This paper shows in two ways that the degree to which free-riding diminishes the performance of deterministic partnerships may be less than has been generally thought. First, a necessary and sufficient condition is provided for a partnership to sustain full efficiency. It implies that many...