For most multi-period decision-making problems, it is generally well-accepted that the influence of information about later periods on the optimal decision in the current period reduces as we move farther into the future. If and when this influence reduces to zero, the corresponding problem...

We address the closely related phenomena of corporate venturing and spin-offs in the context of organizational economics, for example, agency perspectives and the evolutionary perspective on firms. These perspectives allow us to say something about both the amount and nature of variety creation...

Like most economists, Austrians have not shown much interest in the theory of the firm. This paper argues, however, that there is much in Austrian economics that dovetails with contemporary theorizing about the firm. Specifically, Austrian economics (in its Hayekian version) is compared to the...

I discuss the rhetorical dimensions of bounded rationality in two different, yet related, contexts, namely in the practice of organizational economists and in Herbert Simon’s key attempts to persuade economists to take bounded rationality seriously, his Ely lecture and his Nobel Prize lecture....

This paper examines whether exporting activity matters for firm's price cost margins. The recent literature on exporting and productivity shows that exporters on average are more efficient than nonexporters. If that is the case we may also expect them to have different mark-ups. We investigate...

We analyze a key problem in organization theory and design, namely the potential tension between authority (i.e., the power to make decisions which guide the decisions of another person) and the discretion of employees (i.e., the ability of an agent to control resources including his own human...

In an influential paper Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) argue that the evidence on the international disparity in per-capita income levels and growth rates is consistent with a standard Solow model, once it has been augmented to include human capital as an accumulable factor. In a study on...

In this paper we present latest facts about the R&D activities of German multinational companies abroad and R&D activities of foreign companies in Germany. These results confirm that Germany is still an attractive location for R&D activites of multinational companies in many technological...

This paper contributes to the debate on the internationalization of the R&D activity of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Specifically, we examine the following research questions: (1) What are the determinants of the MNEs’ R&D internationalization level? (2) What types of internationalization...