The study examines US-European productivity and worker attitude differences, focusing on changes in incentive structures. We analyze productivity and worker attitudes in five plants in the UK and US belonging to the same multinational producer of automotive sensors and actuators. We examine the...

Recent work linking the adoption of key organizational practices to productivity raises an important question: if adoption increases productivity so dramatically, why does adoption across an industry take so long? This paper explores this question in the context of one particularly interesting...

We study how firms differ from their competitors using new time-varying measures of product differentiation based on text-based analysis of product descriptions from 50,673 firm 10-K statements filed yearly with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This year-by-year set of product...

We develop a property-rights model of the firm in which production entails a continuum of uniquely sequenced stages. In each stage, a final-good producer contracts with a distinct supplier for the procurement of a customized stage-specific component. Our model yields a sharp characterization for...

This paper studies the extensive and intensive margins of firms' global sourcing decisions. We develop a quantifiable multi-country sourcing model in which heterogeneous firms self-select into importing based on their productivity and country-specific variables. The model delivers a simple...

We model the sorting of medical students across medical occupations and identify a mechanism that explains the possibility of differential productivity across occupations. The model combines moral hazard and matching of physicians and occupations with pre-matching investments. In equilibrium...

We study a market with free entry and exit of firms who can produce high-quality output by making a costly but efficient initial unobservable investment. If no learning about this investment occurs, an extreme "lemons problem" develops, no firm invests, and the market shuts down. Learning...

We show that measurable managerial characteristics have significant explanatory power for corporate financing decisions beyond traditional capital-structure determinants. First, managers who believe that their firm is undervalued view external financing as overpriced, especially equity. Such...

General Motors was once regarded as one of the best managed and most successful firms in the world, but between 1980 and 2009 its share of the US market fell from 62.6 to 19.8 percent, and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt. In this paper we argue that the conventional explanation for this decline -...

Due to the limited availability of firm-level compensation data, there is little empirical evidence on the impact of compensation plans on personal productivity. We study an international law firm that moves from high-powered individual incentives towards incentives for "leadership" activities...