The compensation of executive board members in Germany has become a highly controversial topic since Vodafone's hostile takeover of Mannesmann in 2000 and it is again in the spotlight since the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2009. Based on unique panel data evidence of the 500 largest firms...

We incorporate trade in tasks à la Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) into a small open economy version of the theory of firm organization of Marin and Verdier (2012) to examine how offshoring affects the way firms organize. We show that the offshoring of production tasks leads firms to...

What insights can be gained from bringing the theory of the firm to the global economy? I discuss several new features of the world economy that can be explained by incorporating the theory of the firm into the theory of international trade. Among the new features I discuss are the move to...

Recent literature on international trade has established that the most productive firms become multinationals. But our data reveal a startling variation in productivity levels of foreign affliates across the countries in Eastern Europe of the same European multinational parent firms suggesting...

This note demonstrates how performance measure congruity and noise determine an agency’s total surplus within an linear agency framework with multiple tasks. It provides a decomposition of agency costs, leading back to a congruity index previously proposed in the literature. In addition,...

This paper investigates the role of variance analysis procedures in aligning objectives under the condition of distorted performance measurement. A riskneutral agency with linear contracts is analyzed, whereby the agent receives postcontract, pre-decision information on his productivity. If the...

The rise of barter and non-cash payments has become a dominant feature of the Russian transition to a market economy. This paper confronts with empirical evidence two approaches to explain barter in Russia: the ’illusion view’ and the ’trust view’ of barter. The...

This paper develops a theory which investigates how firms’ choice of corporate organization is affecting firm performance and the nature of competition in international markets. We develop a model in which firms’ organisational choices determine heterogeneity across firms in size...

This paper is a reply to Barry Ickes' critique of my paper “Trust versus Illusion: What is Driving Demonetization in Russia?†in which I show that the data reject Barry Ickes' Virtual Economy explanation of barter in Russia in favor of an institutional explanation based on the lack of...

This paper analyzes the use of alternative performance measures in an agency model in which contracting incorporates both formal and informal agreements. It is shown that under a proper use of verifiable and unverifiable performance measures, the two types of contracts are complements,...