The make-or-buy decision is analyzed in a three-layer principal-management-agent model. There is a cost-saving/quality tradeoff in effort provision. The principal faces the choice between employing an in-house management and contracting with an independent management; the cost-saving incentives...

The make-or-buy decision is analyzed in a simple framework combining contractual incompleteness with the existence of imperfect but contractible performance measures. Contractual incompleteness gives rise to two regimes, identified with make and buy. The performance measure on which...

This paper analyzes a sequential game where firms decide about outsourcing the production of a non-specific input good to an imperfectly competitive input market. We apply the taxonomy of business strategies introduced by Fudenberg and Tirole (1984) to characterize the different equilibria. We...

We develop a new monthly panel survey of business executives and a new question design that elicits subjective probability distributions over own-firm outcomes at a one-year lookahead horizon. Our Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) began in 2014 and now covers 1,500 firms drawn from all 50...

We draw on the monthly Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) to make three observations about pandemic-era uncertainty in the U.S. economy. First, equity market traders and executives of nonfinancial firms share similar assessments about uncertainty at one-year lookahead horizons. That is, the...

This paper uses a panel of Swedish manufacturing firms to examine the effects of internal and external R&D on total factor productivity over the period 1991-2004. The findings give some support to the notion of complementarity between internal and external R&D, especially in industries with high...

This paper focuses on the automobile industry and examines the nature of global value chains in it with reference to the case of India. The aim is to explore the relation between lead firms, particularly MNCs, and the extent to they have contributed to the development of the Indian automobile...

This paper analyzes the impact of family firms' past and future economic viability on the incumbents' decision on the business transfer mode. Using the German IAB Establishment Panel and estimating logistic regression models we show that the decision on the business transfer mode rather depends...

While existing research on business successions stresses the importance of the economic situation of family business in this context, research on women's entrepreneurship, however, suggests that women-led businesses may be less economically attractive for potential successors because of...

We analyze the endogenous formation of R&D networks, where firms are active in different product markets and can benefit from R&D spillovers form collaborating firms within or across different industries. R&D spillovers help firms to introduce process innovations to lower their production costs....