This paper takes a retrospective look at the U.S. government's effort to rescue and restructure General Motors and Chrysler in the midst of the 2009 economic and financial crisis. The paper describes how two of the largest industrial companies in the world came to seek a bailout from the U.S....

During the 1930s and 1940s, collective bargaining emerged as the workplace governance norm in much of the U.S. industrial sector. Following its peak in the 1950s, union density in the U.S. private sector fell steadily, to only 7.4 percent in 2006. Governance shifted from a formalized union norm...

The low quality of education is a persistent problem in many developed countries. Parallel to in the last decades exists a tendency towards decentralization in many developed and developing countries. Using micro data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) referred to 22...

We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose...

Using panel data for a maximum of 109 countries over the years 1976-2000, we empirically analyze the impact of decentralization on the occurrence of transnational terror. Our results show that expenditure decentralization reduces the number of transnational terror events in a country, while...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are known to contribute significantly to aggregate economic growth. However, little is known about the role played by management practices in SME growth since recession. We contribute to the literature on SME growth by analysing longitudinal...

In this study, we address the relationship between performance appraisal and competitive strategy, as well as the impact of this relationship on firm performance. The results indicate that the adoption of developmental performance appraisal and the use of administrative performance appraisal are...

We develop a general equilibrium model of international trade with heterogeneous firms, where countries can invest into basic research to improve their technological potential. These research investments tighten firm selection and raise the average productivity of firms in the market, thereby...

We develop a theory of a firm in an environment with incomplete contracts. The firm's headquarter decides on the complexity, the organization, and the global scale of its production process. Specifically, it decides: i) on the mass of symmetric intermediate inputs that are part of the value...

We present evidence about the role of rent sharing in fostering the interdependence of labour markets around the world. Our results draw on a firm-level panel of more than 2,000 multinationals and more than 5,000 of their affiliates, covering 47 home and host countries. We find considerable...