The analyses below compare the career histories and personal characteristics of the executives in the top ranks of the world's largest and most stable business operations, the Fortune 100, between 1980 and 2001. To our knowledge, there have been no prior studies of contemporary changes in the...

The existence of complementarity across management practices has been proposed as one potential explanation for the persistence of firm-level productivity differences. However, thus far no conclusive population-level tests of the complementary joint adoption of management practices have been...

This chapter reviews academic research on the connections between agglomeration and innovation. We first describe the conceptual distinctions between invention and innovation. We then describe how these factors are frequently measured in the data and some resulting empirical regularities....

We examine the bidding behavior of firms competing on ERCOT, the hourly electricity balancing market in Texas. We characterize an equilibrium model of bidding into this uniform-price divisible-good auction market. Using detailed firm-level data on bids and marginal costs of generation, we find...

This paper empirically investigates the possible market power effects of vertical integration proposed in the theoretical literature on vertical foreclosure. It uses a rich data set of cement and ready-mixed concrete plants that spans several decades to perform a detailed case study. There is...

Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differences between trading and non-trading firms, demonstrates how these differences...

Economists have often argued that "pay for performance" is the optimal compensation scheme. However, use of the simplest form of pay for performance, the piece rate, has been in decline in manufacturing in recent decades. We show both theoretically and empirically that these changes are due to...

This article provides empirical tests of the hypothesis of ‘optimal cognitive distance’, proposed by Nooteboom (1999, 2000), in two distinct empirical settings. Variety of cognition, needed for learning, has two dimensions: the number of agents with different cognition, and differences in...

Since the early 1990s international - or even global - outsourcing of intermediate products from suppliers has been propagated as a key means to improve the performance of firms. It is argued that becoming more lean and internationally focused is beneficial for the buyer as well as for the...