E-commerce sales have grown rapidly worldwide, massively increasing the availability of new products. We examine data from the largest digital platform in China and find that the number of book titles almost doubled, prices fell somewhat, and most new books are sold to consumers with unusual...

Little is known theoretically, and even less empirically, about the relationship between firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within firms. We develop a model in which firms choose which suppliers to integrate and whether to delegate decisions to integrated suppliers. We test...

We use daily administrative data from a leading automobile manufacturer to study the organizational impacts of introducing new models to the auto assembly line. We first show that costly defects per vehicle spike when new models are introduced. As a response, the firm trains in problem-solving...

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 paper uses a new data source to analyze the choice of organizational form of retail gasoline stations. In recent years, gasoline stations have tended to be less likely to be owned and operated by a lessee dealer and more likely to be owned and operated by the refiner. Critics have alleged...