Does public ownership have negative consequences for professional service firms by reducing employee incentives? I address this question with a panel of advertising agencies. Public ownership was associated with inferior performance for small agencies but not for large agencies; and there was no...

After some two years of deliberations, in July 2006 the SEC released its long-awaited Guidance on the scope of the soft dollar safe harbor. Passed as part of the Securities Acts Amendments in May, 1975, the safe harbor has protected fund advisers and other money managers for over 30 years from...

This paper relies on the economics of transaction costs to assess the likely effect on investor welfare of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC's) prohibition on an innovative business practice known as directed brokerage. Its key insight is that the quality of a broker's execution...

The concept of vertical architecture defines the scope of a firm and the extent to which it is open to final and intermediate markets. A firm can make or buy inputs, and transfer outputs downstream or sell them. Permeable vertical architectures are partly integrated and partly open to the...

The Kyoto Protocol was approved in February 2005 and the carbon market without rules, played by pioneer companies interested in learning how to do with their corporate image, started working towards a formality. As Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) market has already established Institutional...

It is often argued that competition forces managers to make better choices, thus favoring managerial autonomy in decision making. I formalize and challenge this idea. Suppose that managers care about keeping their position or avoiding interference, and that they can make strategic choices that...

Organizational competitiveness should not be analysed only in terms of performance (competitiveness “as result”), but also by taking into account the capacity to defend and constantly renew its sources of competitive advantage (competitiveness as “driver of competitive advantage”). The...

In this paper, to begin with, we define soft information as qualitative, subjective information produced by banks through the establishment of long-term lending relationships. We then highlight the importance of soft information for cooperative and social banks in the screening, pricing and...

The objective of this paper is to find the key factors that affect a firm's optimal transfer pricing policy. It examines two minimalist vertical models — one consisting of a vertically integrated firm monopolizing an intermediate input for its own and rival's downstream division, and the other...