It has been argued that Asia's remarkable economic achievements of the past 50 years build on institutional arrangements very different from the West, notably the central role of business groups (BGs). As Asian economies move from extensive to intensive growth, we enquire whether the business...

We develop a theory of firm scope in which integrating two firms into one facilitates the allocation of resources, but leads to weaker incentives for effort, compared with non-integration. Our theory makes minimal assumptions about the underlying agency problem. Moreover, the benefits and costs...

Informal long-term relationships and mutual confidence play a crucial role in modern economies in at least two dimensions. First, the performance of firms is strongly affected by their capacity to solve organizational questions effectively and this capacity is apparently strongly related to...

The paper analyzes how the choice of organizational structure leads to the best compromise between controlling behavior based on authority rights and minimizing costs for implementing high efforts. Concentrated delegation and hierarchical delegation turn out to be never an optimal compromise. If...

In many countries, schools have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by splitting up classes. While the purpose of dividing classes is clearly health-related, the process of doing so poses an interesting question: what is the best way to divide a class so as to maximize the incentive for students...

This paper presents theory and evidence showing that institutional reforms in developing countries can effectively expand their product varieties in export. Our model demonstrates that relaxing foreign ownership controls and improving contract enforcement can induce multinational companies to...

The inclination of individuals to improve their performance when it lags behind that of others with whom they naturally compare themselves can be harnessed to optimize the individuals' effort in work and study. In a given set of individuals, we characterize each individual by his relative...

This paper develops a simple general equilibrium model which establishes a link between the patience of economic agents and the well-being of nations. We show that firms in long-term oriented countries can mitigate hold-up inefficiencies by engaging with their suppliers in relational contracting...

It has been claimed that the market fosters selfishness and thereby undermines the moral basis of society. This thesis has been developed with an emphasis on market exchange. Everyday life is, however, predominantly shaped by interactions in the workplace rather than by shopping behaviour. This...

"Implicit Contracts, incentive compatibility, and involuntary unemployment" (MacLeod and Malcomson, 1989) remains our most highly cited work. We briefly review the development of this paper and of our subsequent related work, and conclude with reflections on the future of relational contract...