One of the strongest trends in recent macroeconomic modeling of labor market fluctuations is to treat unemployment inflows as acyclical. This trend stems in large part from an influential paper by Shimer on quot;Reassessing the Ins and Outs of Unemployment,quot; i.e., the extent to which...

Usinga detailed sample of semi-skilled production workers we find that holding a wide range of personal and job-related characteristics constant, workers assigned to more complex jobs seem to be more likely to quit than are workers assigned to simpler jobs. Job complexity has no discernible...

We survey an emerging literature at the intersection of organizational economics and international trade. We argue that a proper modelling of the organizational aspects of production provides valuable insights on the aggregate workings of the world economy. In reviewing the literature, we...

This paper investigates the divisional investment policies of diversified firms. We find that investment of the smallest division of diversified firms is significantly related to the cash flow of the other segments. We then show that the smallest division's investment is more sensitive to the...

This paper investigates how organizational structure can affect a firm's ability to compete. In particular, we examine the two ways in which U.S. commercial banks organized their investment banking operations before the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act forced the banks to leave the securities business:...

This paper shows that the result of Ju and Krishna (2002, 2005), i.e., the non-monotonicity in the comparative statics across regimes, disappears, if exporters differ in their productivities, which provides very different predictions about the results of policy changes

We study the economics of employment relationships through theoretical and empirical analysis of an unusual set of firms, large law firms. Our point of departure is the quot;property rightsquot; approach that emphasizes the centrality of ownership's legal rights to control important, non-human...

This paper examines the impact of vertical integration on the dynamics of performance over the automobile product development lifecycle. Building on recent work in organizational economics and strategy, we evaluate the relationship between vertical integration and different performance margins....

Using a unique longitudinal representative survey of both manufacturing and non-manufacturing businesses in the United States during the 1990's, I examine the incidence and intensity of organizational innovation and the factors associated with investments in organizational innovation. Past...

This paper establishes a causal effect of competition from trade liberalization on various characteristics of organizational design. We exploit a unique panel dataset on firm hierarchies (1986-1999) of large U.S. firms and find that increasing competition leads firms to become flatter, i.e., (i)...