In modern knowledge driven economies, firms are increasingly aware that individual and collective knowledge is a major factor of economic performance. The larger the firms and the stronger their connection with technology intensive industries, the more are they likely to set up knowledge...

We use a comprehensive dataset of French manufacturing firms to study their internal organization. We first divide the employees of each firm into `layers' using occupational categories. Layers are hierarchical in that the typical worker in a higher layer earns more, and the typical firm...