Informal long-term relationships and mutual confidence play a crucial role in modern economies in at least two dimensions. First, the performance of firms is strongly affected by their capacity to solve organizational questions effectively and this capacity is apparently strongly related to...

When procurement contracts are incomplete, they are frequently changed after the contract is awarded to the lowest bidder. This results in a final cost that differs from the initial price, and may involve significant transaction costs due to renegotiation. We propose a stylized model of bidding...

Halal certification of financials product may reduce transaction costs for its buyers when it provides a trusted standard for investors that seek to comply with Islamic law. However, we show that in practice it takes considerable amounts of time (20 days ) and money (USD 122,000) to obtain a...

Rugby union only went professional in 1995, much later than other major team sports resulting in major changes in league structures. Different arrangements regarding revenue sharing and salary caps between the three main European rugby leagues provides an opportunity to test the impact of such...

In this paper, a formal rent-seeking theory of the firm is developed. The main idea is that integration (compared to non-integration) facilitates rent-seeking for the integrating party, but makes it harder for the integrated one. In a one-period model, this implies that the rent-seeking contest...

Europe is reorganizing its international value chain. I document these changes in Europe's international organization of production with new survey data of Austrian and German firms investing in Eastern Europe. I show estimates of the share of intrafirm trade between Austria or Germany on the...

This paper studies the impact of innovation on the organizational structure. The theoretical framework predicts that a larger parental pool of knowledge raises the probability of offshoring. This holds in a national as well as an international context. However, when the producer loses...

Cultural evolution is a long-term endogenous process which is revealed in society's cultural traits and it is embodied in institutional characteristics (property rights protection, rule of law, etc.) and transaction characteristics (risk levels, time required for start-ups, corruption levels,...

We consider a partnership game with two roles in which a large population of firms interact to carry out, say, R&D joint ventures. The partners have to build a common-property asset through a sequence of costly investments. Firms have access to a monitoring technology whose cost depends on the...