Property rights protection has been found to promote economic growth at the macro level, and affect the incentive for investment at the micro level. What is not clear is whether and how property rights protection affects a firm's allocation of investment across industries for a given size of...

The notion of “capability” has long been influential in management research as an approach to address firm-level heterogeneity and heterogeneity in competitive outcomes. I discuss how recent advances in economics may allow for a more rigorous understanding and measurement of capability that...

We formalize firms’ research and development (R&D) diversification decisions during the pre-market phase of an emerging standards setting. Capturing transaction costs, resource-based considerations, and network effects in a two-player model, in which both agents are fully diversifiable and...

Market power on each side of a multisided platform, whether in the form of increasing prices or decreasing quality, is constrained by the risk of losing sales on the other sides. That tends to weaken market power on each side and encourages platforms to keep prices lower and quality higher than...

This paper shows that logarithmic transformation of the number of employees in an organization is nothing other than an approximation of the number of levels of hierarchy in that organization. Since the log of the number of employees has been used extensively in the literature as a measure of...

This paper develops a matching model in the director market with outside options to explain the equilibrium board quality. Based on Hermalin (2005) and Gabaix and Landier (2006), the board of directors has the function of monitoring and advising to affect the earning of firm assuming that the...

A new organizational form, the new generation cooperative (NGC), emerged in the United States during the 1990s as farm producers came together to collectively add value to raw farm commodities. As compared to the traditional cooperative, the NGC facilitates a strong market orientation by...

A large Brazilian agribusiness lender introduces a new contracting technology: grain warehouses. Using runner-up warehouse locations as a control group, I find that lenders' access to these warehouses permits a new debt contract, i.e. a barter credit repayable in grain, increases borrowers' debt...

Being versatile -having the ability to perform different functions- can be a desirable trait for firms that must compete in different environments. However, attaining versatility may come at the high cost of sacrificing the kind of excellence that can only be achieved through specialization....