The empirical core of this essay is a set of estimates of the aggregate transaction costs for sixteen European nations. I explore a number of hypothesized determinants of these costs, but only an economic systems variable, defined in terms of the institutional structure of the country, passes a...

A fundamental principle of economics is that specialization and the division of labor increase the productivity of workers by allowing them to concentrate on narrowly defined tasks. However, not all firms appear to promote a high degree of specialization, but instead rotate workers among several...

This paper develops a two-sector general-equilibrium model in which firms in the primary economy have to create workplaces prior to production and product-market competition. For this, we introduce the endogenous sunk-cost approach with two-stage decisions of firms from IO in the macro labor...

Reductions in the division of labour are a significant feature of modern developments in work organisation. It has been recognised that a reduced division of labour can have the advantages of job enrichment and lower coordination costs. In this paper it is shown how advantages from a lesser...

Partnerships are the prevalent organizational form in many industries. Profits are most frequently shared equally among the partners. The purpose of our paper is to provide a rationale for equal sharing rules. We show that with inequity-averse partners the equal sharing rule is the unique...

This paper develops a model of the competition among states in providing corporate law rules. Such competition is shown to produce optimal rules with respect to issues that do not have a substantial effect on management's private benefits but not with respect to issues that have such an effect....

By extending the incomplete-contract model to the provision of local collective goods, this paper analyzes the political hold-up problem in urban land use. The model focuses on three-party contractual relationships and analyzes the effects of wage and rent capitalization, symmetric or...

The paper proposes a framework to analyze the effects of various bank bailout policies on bank managers' incentives first to lend prudently and second to disclose truthfully their non-performing loans. It is shown that tough bank closure rules have counterproductive effects on bank managers'...

This paper discusses the role of banks and markets in the allocation of risks in an economy. Starting from a discussion of risk allocations in the Arrow-Debreu model, it criticizes the view that banks and markets are substitutes. Instead it is argued that markets are made by intermediaries and...

We show how imperfect memory can imply a preference for increasing payments. We model an agent making a decision regarding effort in two periods. Before the first decision, the agent receives a signal related to the cost of effort, which is subsequently forgotten. Before the second decision, the...