We consider a firm where workers have pre-contractual private information on their cost of production. Before contracting takes place, the owner of the firm can adopt a new technology that reduces production costs for each type of worker. We show that technology adoption may have an adverse rent...

Hierarchy plays an integral role in organizational structure and practices, as well as in society more generally. In Confucian-influenced cultures, and especially in South Korea, social hierarchies are often based on age, and age dynamics can therefore influence social decision-making and...

Using a detailed database of managerial job descriptions, reporting relationships, and compensation structures in over 300 large U.S. firms, we find that firm hierarchies are becoming flatter. The number of positions reporting directly to the CEO has gone up significantly over time while the...

We develop a general multi-scale diversity framework to account for spatial segregation of hierarchically-ordered ethnic groups residing in politically and administratively nested geographic aggregations. We explicate how ethnic diversity, ethnic segregation, and ethnic hierarchy interact with...

We merge firm-level data on ownership linkages with administrative data on German workers to analyze how the position in a business group hierarchy affects workers' wages. To acknowledge that ownership linkages are not onedirectional, we propose an index to measure hierarchical distance to the...