Showing 1 - 10 of 15
Earnings inequality has increased substantially since the 1970s. Using evidence from confidential Census data on U.S. law offices on lawyers' organization and earnings, we study the extent to which the mechanism suggested by Lucas (1978) and Rosen (1982), a scale of operations effect linking...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005778656
We argue that incorporating the decision of how to organize the acquisition, use, and communication of knowledge into economic models is essential to understand a wide variety of economic phenomena. We survey the literature that has used knowledge-based hierarchies to study issues like the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010950675
How does the formation of cross-country teams affect the organization of work and the structure of wages? To study this question we propose a theory of the assignment of heterogeneous agents into hierarchical teams, where less skilled agents specialize in production and more skilled agents...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005084616
This paper provides empirical evidence of favoritism by agents, where that favoritism is generated by social pressure. To do so, we explore the behavior of professional soccer referees. Referees have discretion over the addition of extra time at the end of a soccer game (called injury time), to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005084939
We present a theory of the organization of work in an economy where knowledge is an essential input in production: a knowledge economy. In this economy a continuum of agents with heterogeneous skills must choose how much knowledge to acquire and may produce on their own or in organizations. Our...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005085304
Why do firms decide to offshore certain parts of their production process? What qualifies certain countries as particularly attractive locations to offshore? In this paper we address these questions with a theory of international production hierarchies in which organizations arise endogenously...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005040664
Hierarchies allow individuals to leverage their knowledge through others' time. This mechanism increases productivity and amplifies the impact of skill heterogeneity on earnings inequality. To quantify this effect, we analyze the earnings and organization of U.S. lawyers and use the equilibrium...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005777277
What role do hierarchies play with respect to the organization of production and what determines their structure? We develop an equilibrium model of hierarchical organization, then provide empirical evidence using confidential data on thousands of law offices from the 1992 Census of Services....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005777504
What is the role of firms and markets in mediating the division of labor? This paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine law firms' boundaries. We find that firms' field scope narrows as market size increases and individuals specialize, indicating that firms'...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005778880
In this paper, we study the changes in transaction costs from the introduction of the Internet in transactions between firms (i.e., business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce). We begin with a conceptual framework to organize the changes in transaction costs that are likely to result when a...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005050163