Inertia in academia sometimes obstructs the development of important insights. That is one reason for the specially long gap separating Coase's seminal paper [1937] that laid the foundations of current Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and the efforts of scholars to develop his ideas. But as TCE...

Transaction Costs Theory has been considered the 'new orthodoxy' in the theory of the firm, being this the very same reason for wide criticism by different schools of economic thought. However, there seems to be signs of complementarity between TCT and evolutionary approaches to the firm. Some...

The phenomenon of offshoring, that is, the outsourcing of highly- qualified services into low wage countries was until now considered an economy-specific solution to counteract the constant rise in costs caused by the intensified global competition. At the same time, this form of cross-country...

We derive and discuss a general, but simple geographical economics model with congestion, allowing us to explain the economic viability of small and large locations. The model generalizes some previous work and lends itself to analyzing the impact of public policy in terms of infrastructure...

We derive and discuss a general, but simple geographical economics model with congestion, allowing us to explain the economic viability of small and large locations. The model generalizes some previous work and lends itself to analyzing the impact of public policy in terms of infrastructure...

This paper presents a model of two competing local telecommunications networks, similar in spirit to the model of Laffont, Rey and Tirole(1996). The networks have different attributes which we assume are fixed and the consumers have idiosyncratic tastes for these attributes. The networks are...

This paper sheds new light on the effects of the minimum wage on employment from a two-sided theoretical perspective, in which firms’ job offer and workers’ job acceptance decisions are disentangled. Minimum wages reduce job offer incentives and increase job acceptance incentives. We show...

Since 1995, labor economists have reported on the income disparities between individuals who engage in same-sex behavior and those that do not. Many of these papers report a significant wage penalty, while others find no effect, but few look at the trend over time. We find, using National Health...

Using cross-industry survey data, I examine how the determinants of the pace of work affect the probability of using piece rates. Internal determinants raise the likelihood of piece rates, while response to external needs lowers the probability.

Empirical evidence shows that competition among firms generates steep incentives inside firms. Incentive pay stimulates productive investments but may generate inefficient rent-seeking investments. I show that competition reduces firms’ profits and thereby the inefficient investments, which...