One of the most intriguing and influential questions in organizational theory is ¡°who monitors the monitor?¡± A theory of ownership is proposed by Alchian and Demsetz in answer to this question. In this paper, a model of successive monitoring is constructed to show that, when it is feasible...

Up-or-out contracts can improve human capital investment incentives but lead to suboptimal worker-employer separation. When job matching uncertainty is large relative to the return to human capital investment, spot contracts Pareto dominate up-or-out contracts. Otherwise, up-or-out contracts are...

Some critics of proposed legislative labor policy changes contend that laws favoring labor would adversely affect business investment. Research on labor policy, however, often assumes that investment is fixed. The authors present a sequential bargaining model in which labor policies that...

We model a game to show that the taxation level in an autocracy reflects the state¡¯s coercive power relative to people¡¯s capacity for violence. The model also specifies the mechanisms through which various factors affect relative state power. The model predicts that taxation level...

To better understand the relationship between different types of firm ownership and management turnover, this study classifies ownership along two dimensions: the type of owner and the concentration of ownership. Within this framework, a unique data set is used to study the impact of management...

To more thoroughly study the effect of ownership on management turnover, firms are classified by ownership simultaneously along two dimensions: types of owners and concentration of ownership. Under this new framework, a unique data set is used to study the sensitivity of management turnover to a...

This article investigates how human capital investment, labor turnover, and wages are jointly determined when the current employer knows more about a worker's productivity than potential employers. Results derived are quite different from, or unexplored by, the standard human capital theory. The...