This paper analyzes alternative empirical strategies for studying the effect of organizational design on performance, as well as the factors which determine organizational design. We begin by developing a general economic model of a firm where multiple organizational design practices are...

Using Polish Labour Force Survey data, we examine whether competition for labour has induced individual pay to depend on outside options, availability and quality of jobs. Exploiting the lack of inter-regional job and worker flows we estimate the elasticity of individual pay, amongst a rich set...

This paper presents and investigates a new data set of individual residential property transactions in England. The main novelty of the data is the record of all listing price changes and all offers made on a property, as well as all the visits by potential buyers for a subset of the properties....

This paper analyses optimal contracts in a principal-agent model where the agent is intrinsically motivated at the outset and there is an endogenous relationship between the structure of incentive payments and intrinsic motivation (crowding effects). The analysis shows that crowding effects have...

Software development occurs in a patchwork or “confederacy” of different types of institutions (universities, small start-ups, multinational enterprises, government agencies, etc.) utilizing varied work approaches. Here we speculate on one possible explanation for this organizational...

Patents lead to ex-post dead-weight losses arising from a non-competitive market structure for the invention. Many have argued that introducing independent invention as a defense (IID) to patent infringement can increase social welfare by decreasing such dead-weight losses at the price of a...

Governments throughout the developed world worry incessantly about the implications of sophisticated tax planning for their tax revenues. And yet the same governments routinely stop short of doing all that they can legally do to combat tax avoidance. Why? One response is that a thick conception...

How many cartels are there? The answer is important in assessing the need for competition policy. We present a Hidden Markov Model that answers the question, taking into account that often we do not know whether a cartel exists in an industry or not. We take the model to data from a period of...

We use a monthly dataset for the Colombian banking system from 2002 to 2010 to test the role of interest rate ceilings on competition in different segments of the credit market. We use maximum likelihood estimations of double hurdle probabilistic models to estimate the probability of tacit...

We study entrepreneurship and growth through the lens of U.S. cities. Initial entrepreneurship correlates strongly with urban employment growth, but endogeneity bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near cities led to specialization in industries, like steel, with...