The U.S. temporary help services (THS) industry grew at 11 percent annually between 1979 to 1995, five times more rapidly than non-farm employment. Contemporaneously, courts in 46 states adopted exceptions to the common law doctrine of employment at will that limit employers' discretion to...

We develop an equilibrium model of industrial structure in which the organization of firms is endogenous. Differentiated consumer products can be produced either by vertically integrated firms or by pairs of specialized companies. Production of each variety of consumer good requires a unique,...

Outsourced workers experience large wage declines, yet domestic outsourcing may raise aggregate productivity. To study this equity-efficiency trade-off, we contribute a framework in which firms either hire many imperfectly substitutable worker types in-house by posting wages along a job ladder,...

We model a simple market setting in which fragmentation of trade of the same asset across multiple exchanges improves allocative efficiency. Fragmentation reduces the inhibiting effect of price-impact avoidance on order submission. Although fragmentation reduces market depth on each exchange, it...

General purpose technologies like information technology typically require complementary firm-specific investments to create value. These complementary investments produce a form of capital, which is typically intangible and which we call digital capital. We create an extended firm-level panel...

Why do firms outsource research and development (R&D) for some products while conducting R&D in-house for similar ones? An innovating firm risks cannibalizing its existing products. The more profitable these products, the more the firm wants to limit cannibalization. We apply this logic to the...

We develop a theory of outsourcing in which there is market power in one factor market (labor) and no market power in a second factor market (capital). There are two intermediate goods: one labor-intensive and the other capital-intensive. We show there is always outsourcing in the market...

There exist two approaches in the literature concerning the multinational firm's mode choice for foreign production between an owned subsidiary and a licensing contract. One approach considers environments where the firm is transferring primarily knowledge-based assets. An important assumption...

Using the universe of large Canadian manufacturing firms in 1988 and 1996, we investigate to what extent outsourcing decision can be explained by a simple property rights model. The unique availability of disaggregate information on outputs as well as inputs permits the construction of a very...

To illustrate how small the effects are, suppose that over the next nine years all of inshoring and offshore outsourcing grew at rates experienced during 1996-2005 in business, professional and technical services i.e., in segments where China and India have been particularly strong. Then workers...