Using a unique longitudinal representative survey of both manufacturing and non-manufacturing businesses in the United States during the 1990's, I examine the incidence and intensity of organizational innovation and the factors associated with investments in organizational innovation. Past...

We study the economics of employment relationships through theoretical and empirical analysis of an unusual set of firms, large law firms. Our point of departure is the "property rights" approach that emphasizes the centrality of ownership's legal rights to control important, non-human assets of...

Many organizations rely on teamwork, and yet field evidence on the impacts of team-based incentives remains scarce. Compared to individual incentives, team incentives can affect productivity by changing both workers' effort and team composition. We present evidence from a field experiment...

A growing body of literature over the past decade suggests that a firm's organizational structure/capital can contribute in significant ways to the productive capacity of a firm. But, as with other intangible assets, there is no consensus definition of what this organizational capital is, how to...

This paper analyzes whether workplace employee representation (ER) affects the design of firm hierarchies. We rationalize the role of ER within a knowledge-based model of hierarchies, where the firm's choice of hierarchical layers depends on the trade-off between communication and knowledge...

Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is about twice as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30 percent. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and...

This paper investigates the effect of different communication channels on promise-making and promise-keeping in a helping situation. Four treatments differ with respect to the communication channel employed to solicit unincentivized cooperation, i.e., face-to-face, phone call and two different...

Authority and power permeate political, social, and economic life, but empirical knowledge about the motivational origins and consequences of authority is limited. We study the motivation and incentive effects of authority experimentally in an authority-delegation game. Individuals often retain...

This paper reviews experimental studies that investigate the effects of communication on behavior in organizational settings. Two main classes of studies are identified: (a) studies on coordination and competition, which include experimental research that tests whether communication can help to...