About 10% of US employees now regularly work from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to “shirking from home.” We report the results of a WFH experiment at CTrip, a 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency. Call center employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly...

The aim of this paper is to explore the links between brand equity, consumer learning and consumer choice processes in general, and considering two recent trends in the market place: store brands and the Internet. We first review the advances that have occurred in brand equity research in...

The notion of 'ownership of the firm' is central to conventional treatments of corporate governance, yet there is very little discussion about what this means in practice. In this paper we briefly draw attention to some of the debates around the notion of ownership in various disciplinary...

Corporations simultaneously claim that human capital is increasingly important to their success and that they seek to maximize shareholder value. This paper studies the relationship between these two developments. We show that the pursuit of shareholder interests may require ceding a role in...

Susan Carleton Athey is the 2007 recipient of the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal, which is "awarded biennially to that American economist under the age of forty who is adjudged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge." I have had...

The authors study a rich class of noncooperative games that includes models of oligopoly competition, macroeconomic coordination failures, arms races, bank runs, technology adoption and diffusion, R&D competition, pretrial bargaining, coordination in teams, and many others. For all these games,...

The performance of the Japanese economy in the last forty five years, during which it has gone from post war destitution and near collapse to one of the richest and most productive in the world is unmatched in human history. The purposes of this essay are to interpret both the characteristic...

Working Paper 11 gives a synthesis of Working Papers 7, 9 and 10 (see the relevant Summaries for further details). It also provides a brief synthesis of earlier literature on the fiscal effects of aid, which is related to the wider literature on the development impact of aid and on budget...

Working Paper 9 forms part of a set of four ESAU papers on the fiscal effects of aid in African countries. The others are on Malawi (Working Paper 7), on Zambia (Working Paper 10) and a literature Survey and Synthesis (Working Paper 11). The first, historical and analytical background, part of...