Does competitive pressure foster innovation? In addressing this important question, prior studies ignored a distinction between discrete innovation aiming at entirely new technology and continuous improvement consisting of numerous incremental improvements and modifications made upon the...

It is commonly argued that labor market institutions such as employment protection worsen an economy's performance and particularly so, if product markets become more competitive. Empirical evidence, however, has difficulties to detect a robust negative correlation between employment protection...

Corporate success often resembles a snowball. We show how initial luck in hiring talented people, the resulting technological advantage, superior corporate culture, and status-seeking by workers can make small initial differences generate large differences over time.

In this paper, we present a simple model in which a unionized and non-unionized firm optimally make investment decisions given their labor productivity. By allowing workers' organizations to have positive effects on labor effort, we find that the classic hold-up problem does not necessarily...

This paper shows that the opportunity costs resulting from economic interdependence decrease the equilibrium probability of war in an incomplete information game. This result is strongly consistent with existing empirical analyses of the inverse trade-conflict relationship, but is the opposite...

Monitoring by peers is often an effective means of attenuating incentive problems. Most explanations of the efficacy of mutual monitoring rely either on small group size or on a version of the Folk theorem with repeated interactions which requires reasonably accurate public information...