The theory of the firm suggests that firms can respond to poor contract enforcement by vertically integrating their production process. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether firms' integration opportunities affect the way contract enforcement institutions determine international trade...

The industrial organization of developing countries is characterized by the pervasive use of subcontracting arrangements among small, financially constrained firms. This paper asks whether vertical integration relaxes those financial constraints. It shows that vertical integration trades off the...

The theory of the firm suggests that firms can respond to poor contract enforcement by vertically integrating their production process. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether firms' integration opportunities affect the way institutions determine international trade patterns. We find...

This paper provides an empirical analysis that examines the effect of both, transaction characteristics and the institutional environment on the choice of governance. Using a dataset of 237 corporate-specific value chains in the global LNG industry, we introduce inter-organizational trust as a...

In many U.S. states, the law firms that represent lenders in foreclosure proceedings must hire auctioneers to carry out the foreclosure auctions. The authors empirically test whether processing times differ for law firms that integrate the mortgage foreclosure auction process compared with law...

Using firm-level data on vertical integration of Korean manufacturers, the paper tests whether trade liberalization is an important determinant of firm's decision on vertical integration. We develop an empirical framework incorporating trade openness into industrial organization models;...

Local and regional policy makers are acquiring an increasingly active role in affecting firms' specialization decisions that in turn influence firms' vertical organization. We analyse the relation between vertical integration incentives and trade liberalization in the presence of glocal...

Much of the literature on what determines the scope of operations of a producer has centered on the ``hold-up problemquot;. The standard results indicate the hold-up problem may lead to suboptimal investments, and therefore integration may improve the organization of production. In this paper,...

Theoretical and empirical research in the past decades has advanced our understanding of what determines the vertical boundary of a firm. An equally important but much less understood issue is the impacts of vertical integration on firm performance, mainly because the decision on vertical...

In this paper we analyze the problem of the enforcement of incomplete contracts with endogenous outside options. Some of the equilibria we outline may reverse one of the main results presented in the standard literature. We then revisit the literature on the highly debated Fisher Body/General...