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...

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...

What determines whether or not multinational firms transplant their mode of organisation to other countries? We embed the theory of knowledge hierarchies in an industry equilibrium model of monopolistic competition to examine how the economic environment may affect the decision of a...

Europe is reorganizing its international value chain. I document these changes in Europe’s international organization of production with new survey data of Austrian and German firms investing in Eastern Europe. I show estimates of the share of intrafirm trade between Austria or Germany on...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004Globalization has been identified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities and as the emergence of talent as the new stakeholder in the firm. This paper examines the role of trade integration for the...

In this paper we analyze the conditions under which a foreign direct investment (FDI) involves a net capital flow across countries. Frequently, foreign direct investment is financed in the host country without an international capital movement. We develop a model in which the optimal choice of...

Corporate organization varies within a country and across countries with country size. The paper starts by establishing some facts about corporate organization based on unique data of 660 Austrian and German corporations. The larger country (Germany) has larger firms with flatter and more...

Recent theories of the multinational corporation introduce the property rights model of the firm and examine whether to integrate our outsource firm activities locally or to a foreign country. This paper focus instead on the internal organization of the multinational corporation by examining the...

Recent years have witnessed an enormous amount of reorganization of the corporate sector in the US and in Europe. This paper examines the role of market competition for this trend in corporate reorganization. We find that at intermediate levels of competition the CEO of the corporation decides...