Despite being a fixture of everyday life in the Arab world, wasta, which may be thought of as special influence by members of the same group or tribe, has received little attention from social scientists. Our casual empiricism suggests that wasta is an important determinant of how economic...

Allowing for three labor market settings (perfect competition or right-to-manage bargaining, efficient bargaining and monopsony), this paper relies on an extension of Hall's econometric framework for estimating simultaneously price-cost margins and scale economies. Using an unbalanced panel of...

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...

Institutions, social norms and the nature of industrial relations vary greatly between Latin American and Western European countries. Such institutional and organizational differences might shape firms' operational environment in general and the type of competition in product and labor markets...

Empirical labor economists have resorted to estimating the responsiveness of workers' wages on firms' ability to pay to assess the extent to which employers share rents with their employees. This paper compares this labor economics approach with two other approaches that rely on standard micro...

The paper revisits the problem of wage bargaining between a firm and multiple workers. We show that the Subgame Perfect Equilibrium of the extensive-form game proposed by Stole and Zwiebel (1996a) does not imply a profile of wages and profits that coincides with the Shapley values as claimed in...

This contribution investigates whether working time accounts are beneficial for the performance of German establishments. Based on the representative German Establishment Panel of the Institute for Employment Research during the period 2008-2013, effects on productivity, wages, sales, firm size,...

This paper analyses the determinants of different innovation types. Beside a wide range of firm characteristics also the effects of regional factors are estimated using three-level random effect logit models which account for the clustered and longitudinal structure of the data. The analyses...

Using a panel of new firms and their employees, this paper studies the promotion opportunities for older workers within the same firm. Survival analysis suggests that younger employees experience shorter times to promotion than older workers and, therefore, the latter face a smaller likelihood...

We present a new partial equilibrium theory of price adjustment, based on consumer loss aversion. In line with prospect theory, the consumers' perceived utility losses from price increases are weighted more heavily than the perceived utility gains from price decreases of equal magnitude. Price...