Why do firms decide to offshore certain parts of their production process? Whatqualifies certain countries as particularly attractive locations to offshore? In thispaper we address these questions with a theory of international production hierarchiesin which organizations arise endogenously to...

An organization will often use a specialized technical language that is un-derstood by its members but not by others. We develop a theory of optimalorganizational languages and identify a key trade-o¤ between facilitatinginternal communication and encouraging communication with other...

This paper examines hierarchies’ role in the organization of human-capital-intensive productionWe develop an equilibrium model of hierarchical organization, then provide empirical evidenceusing confidential data on thousands of law offices from the 1992 Census of Services. We showhow the...

We present an equilibrium theory of the organization of work in an economywhere knowledge is an essential input in production and agents are heterogeneousin skill. Agents organize production by matching with others in knowledgehierarchies designed to use and communicate their knowledge...

The knowledge economy is nothing new. As Chandler’s (1977) classic study documents,improvements in communication technology (e.g. mail via railways, thetelegraph, and later the telephone) played a key role in the emergence of the modernAmerican corporation in the late 19th century and the...

How does the formation of cross-country teams affect the organization of workand the structure of wages? To study this question, we propose a theory of theassignment of heterogeneous agents into hierarchical teams, where less skilledagents specialize in production and more skilled agents...

Two recent failures of the United States intelligence system have led to thecreation of high-level investigative commissions. The failure to prevent theterrorist attacks of 9/11 prompted the creation of the 9/11 Commission, andthe mistaken belief that Saddam Hussein had retained weapons of...

Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (2003) show that knowledge-based hierarchies arecharacterized by positive sorting between workers and managers when knowledgeacquisition takes place before production. We extend the analysis and find thatcomplementarities between manager and worker skill are even...

Since the seminal work of Katz and Murphy (1992), the study of wage inequalityhas taken as its starting point a neoclassical CES production function using as inputscapital and low and high skill labor. This approach assumes that the organization ofproduction is fixed and determined by a...

Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the“information” and “communication” components together. We show theoretically and empirically thatthese have very different effects on the empowerment of employees, and by extension on wageinequality....