We show that access to finance may affect firms through the labour market. Talented workers want to realise their ideas but also seek insurance against income risk. Large firms default less often than small firms but they investigate more thoroughly and reject more good ideas. With easier access...

In the nineties, average firm size decreased, organisations decentralized, and workers preferences shifted from large to small firms. Our model identifies the economic forces behind this trend. Small firms with little capital at risk are subject to risk-shifting. They realize more of their...

In the nineties, average firm size decreased, organizations decentralized, and workers preferences shifted from large to small firms. Our model identifies the economic forces behind this trend. Small firms with little capital risk are subject to risk shifting. They realize more of their...

During the nineties, talented workers began to spurn secure jobs in large organizations, which were formerly considered prestigious. They developed more positive attitudes towards jobs in small, innovative startups, although these involved less job security. We build a model that identifies some...

<title>Abstract</title> Railways restructuring takes place under very different circumstances and with very different goals in Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia. There are some improvements in productivity associated with the reforms in the European Union (among others access to...

We investigate whether management quality explains firm performance in Russia. We find that it explains relatively little in terms of firm performance, but it does explain some of the differences between firms in Russia’s Far East and the rest of Russia. Firms that have always been in private...

We investigate the restructuring of the US freight railroad industry after its deregulation. An econometric analysis of the joint effects of 'defensive' and 'strategic restructuring' reveals that, unsurprisingly, downsizing of the physical network has affected financial performance positively....

We introduce financial constraints in a theoretical analysis of illegal immigration. Intermediaries finance the migration costs of wealth-constrained migrants, who enter temporary servitude contracts to repay the debt. These debt/labor contracts are easier to enforce in the illegal than in the...

External shocks may cause a decline in the productivity of fixed capital in certain regions of an economy. Exogenous obstacles to migration make it hard for workers in those regions to reallocate to more prosperous regions. In addition, firms may devise “attachment” strategies to keep...

Reallocation of workers from obsolete sectors to more pro…table ones is among the most important challenges for many former centrally planned economies on their road towards a market economy. Due to the Stalinist mode of industrialization, this problem has an important regional dimension:...