Mergers and acquisitions are a fast way for a firm to grow. Using plant-level data, we examine how firms redraw their boundaries after acquisitions. We find that there is a large amount of restructuring in a short period following mergers. Acquirers sell 27% and close 19% of acquired plants...

This paper explores the interaction between incentives, information, and organizational design. It argues that the virtues of the market economy do not lie so much in the vision of competition and decentralization embodied in the Arrow-Debreu model, or the Lange-Lerner-Taylor analysis of market...

We study the relationship between firm centralization and organizational reproduction in satellite locations. For decentralized firms, the ethnic compositions of inventors in satellite locations mostly resemble their host cities, with little link to the inventor composition of their parent...

This survey provides an overview of theoretical and empirical research on information flows in corporations. It highlights key frictions preventing effective information flows and discusses how organizational structure and corporate governance can alleviate these frictions, focusing on three...

Recently, the relative demand for skilled labor has increased dramatically. We investigate one of the causes, skill-biased technical change. Advances in information technology (IT) are among the most powerful forces bearing on the economy. Employers who use IT often make complementary...

General purpose technologies (GPTs) push out the production possibility frontier and are of strategic importance to managers and policymakers. While theoretical models that explain the characteristics, benefits, and approaches to create and capture value from GPTs have advanced significantly,...

Adoption of health information and communication technologies ("HICT") has surged over the past two decades. We survey the medical and economic literature on HICT adoption and its impact on clinical outcomes, productivity and labor. We find that HICT improves clinical outcomes and lowers...

We examine the role of the ICT revolution in driving productivity growth behavior for the United States and an aggregate of ten Western European nations (the EU-10) from 1977 to 2015. We find that the standard growth accounting approach is deficient when it separates sources of growth between...

The extensive literature on knowledge management spans several fields, but there are remarkably few studies that address the basic question as to whether knowledge management practices improve organizational performance. I examine that question using a national probability sample of...

This paper compares the impact of new IT-enhanced technology on the efficiency of production in the U.S. and the U.K. for one manufacturing industry, valve manufacturing. There is a long-standing question of whether technological change and organizational changes have the same rates of adoption...