We build on the imperfection of intellectual property rights as the central motivation for the organization of firms. There are several characteristics specific to a theory of the firm grounded on the absence of intellectual property rights: monetary incentive schemes arise naturally as a...

We consider an entrepreneur that is the sole producer of a cost reducing skill, but the entrepreneur that hires a team to use the skill cannot prevent collusive trade for the innovation-related knowledge between employees and competitors. We show that there are two types of diffusion-avoiding...

In the paper the trade-offs among endogenous transaction costs caused by two-sided moral hazard, exogenous monitoring cost, and economies of specialization are specified in a Grossman, Hart, and Moore (GHM) model to absorb Maskin and Tirole's recent critique and Holmstrom and Milgrom's criticism...

This paper formalizes Cheung, Coase, Stigler, and Young's theory of irrelevance of the size of the firm. This theory states that if division of labor develops within the firm, the average size of the firm and productivity go up side by side. If division of labor develops between firms, the...

In this paper a general equilibrium model is constructed to explain the emergence of firms and change in firm size by the tradeoff between economies of specialization and transaction cost. We show that firms emerge from the development of division of labor if the transaction efficiency for labor...

In the paper the trade-offs among endogenous transaction costs caused by two-sided moral hazard, exogenous monitoring cost, and economies of specialization are specified in a Grossman, Hart and Moore (GHM) model to absorb Maskin and Tirole’s recent critique and Holmstrom and Milgrom’s...

Recent years have witnessed an enormous amount of reorganization of the corporate sector in the US and in Europe. This paper examines the role of market competition for this trend in corporate reorganization. We find that at intermediate levels of competition the CEO of the corporation decides...

This paper views authority as the right to undertake decisions that have external effects on other members of the organization. Because of contractual incompleteness, monetary incentives are insufficient to internalize these effects in the decision maker's objective. The optimal assignment of...

Globalization has been identified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities and as the emergence of talent as the new stakeholder in the firm. This paper examines the role of trade integration for the changing nature of the corporation. International trade leads to a "war for...

This paper studies the effect of trade facilitation on vertical firm structure using plant-level data from Switzerland. Based on the Business Census and the Input-Output table, we first calculate a binary measure of vertical integration for all plants registered in Switzerland. We then estimate...