We study relational contracts as a means to govern transactions across firm boundaries. We focus on the airline industry, where real-time adaptation of flight schedules under bad weather is not formally contractible, and yet is essential for performance and long-term profitability. While...

The goal of this paper is to develop a comprehensive research agenda to analyze trends in domestic outsourcing in the United States - firms' use of contractors and independent contractors - and its effects on job quality and inequality. In the process, we review definitions of outsourcing, the...

The goal of this paper is to develop a comprehensive research agenda to analyze trends in domestic outsourcing in the United States — firms’ use of contractors and independent contractors — and its effects on job quality and inequality. In the process, we review definitions of outsourcing,...

We study the effect of information technology (IT) investment and merger integration on the value derived from 118 mergers in the U.S. banking industry. We quantify integration depth based on expenditures in merger-related integration, and examine how pre-merger IT intensity of the acquiring...

Based on the publicly available information on the data sources and methodology used by the Census Bureau to estimate e-commerce and physical retail sales, and based on detailed e-mail communications with the Census official responsible for the retail trade data, we found, in a version of this...

This chapter from a Practical Guide to Transfer Pricing (Lexis) compares the U.S. Section 482 transfer pricing regulations to the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and Tax Administrations as revised in 2010. Section 482's purpose is to ensure that taxpayers subject...

Financial constraints are an important impediment to the growth of small businesses. We study theoretically and empirically how the financial constraints of agents affect their decisions to exert effort, and, hence the organizational decisions and growth of principals, in the context of...

We use a simple model of collaborative innovation to structure an empirical analysis of minority equity links in biotechnology alliances between clients and R&D firms. In the model, an equity link is an investment in information acquisition: it improves the ability of the client to learn about...

Coordination costs in a wholesale market are the need to determine the price and other parameters of the transaction, make the existence of buyers and sellers known to one another, and bring buyers and sellers together. The mitigation of coordination costs, all else equal, should increase...