Until about 13,000 years ago all humans obtained their food through hunting and gathering, but thereafter people in some parts of the world began a transition to agriculture. Recent data strongly implicate climate change as the driving force behind the transition in southwest Asia. We propose a...

Empirical research on the organization of firms requires that firms be classified on the basis of their control structures. This should be done in a way that can potentially be made operational. It is easy to identify the ultimate controller of a hierarchical organization, and the literature has...

The new institutional economics regards the firm as a set of incomplete contracts among input suppliers. The theory of the firm must therefore explain how decision-making powers are allocated. Two leading candidates for such control rights are capital suppliers and labor suppliers. Most large...