Blockchain technology is firmly established in the public awareness as a revolutionary new technology underpinning cryptocurrency. However, its potential applications can be found across sectors and industries in providing a novel way of producing coordination necessary to transact online,...

This paper sheds new light on the assessment of firm networks via multiple directorships in terms of corporate firm performance. Using a large sample of European listed firms in the period from 2003 to 2011 and system GMM we find a significant compensation effect on corporate firm performance...

This paper highlights that substitution between two types of finance represents an additional channel of adjustment to credit shocks and trade liberalization. Combining firm heterogeneity à la Melitz (2003) with credit frictions based on Holmstrom and Tirole (1997), there is selection of the...

This paper develops a model of global sourcing with culturally dissimilar countries. Production of final goods requires the coordination of decisions between the headquarter of a multinational firm and managers of their component suppliers. Managers of both units are assumed to have strong...

This paper analyses the impact of business process outsourcing (BPO) on firm productivity based on a comprehensive German firm-level panel data set covering manufacturing and service industries. The growing importance of service inputs into the production process is undisputed. Firms...

In this paper, I analyse how the survival of new firms is affected by the average ability level in the founding team, the team size, team members' homogeneity with respect to ability, and team members' heterogeneity with respect to education. As a theoretical basis, I apply the O-ring theory...

There are three parts of our paper. Firstly, it gives an overview about the goals and factors which affect the integration of local communal services. Horizontal integration means joining the various individual service providers, such as water supply and sewage, communal waste, district heating,...

Knowledge of whether, and over what range of output, there are economies or diseconomies of scale in providing local communal services is an important question from theoretical, practical and regional political point of view also. The theoretical side of the question is connected to the...

We provide experimental evidence for the hypothesis that bounded rationality is an important element of the theory of the firm. We implement a simplified version of a mechanism designed to perfectly solve the holdup problem under conditions of perfect rationality (Maskin 2002). We test whether...

I study the interaction between optimal procurement and outsourcing of production in small industries. First, two sellers decide about outsourcing. By outsourcing, a seller loses information about the costs of producing to his supplier. Then the buyer designs the procurement mechanism and...