We develop an endogenous growth model to study the long run consequences of offshoring with firm heterogeneity and incomplete contracts. In so doing, we model offshoring as the geographical fragmentation of a firm's production chain between a home upstream division and a foreign downstream one....

Recent studies indicate that firms often outsource standard and simple tasks, while keeping complex and important inputs inside their boundaries. This observation is difficult to reconcile with the property rights approach of the firm, which suggests that important components should be...

Recent studies indicate that firms often outsource standard and simple tasks, while keeping complex and important inputs inside their boundaries. This observation is difficult to reconcile with the property rights approach of the firm, which suggests that important components should be...

The private-collective business models that involve both private investment incentives and the production of public goods are not well understood. This empirically oriented research uses the unique data from the software industries of five European countries (Finland, Germany, Italy, Portugal...

In Europe, a huge share of firms is family owned. Since family firms are known to be more risk averse concerning international transactions, an interesting question emerges: Do family firms adopt a different international sourcing pattern. Altering the Gloubal Sourcing model of Antràs and...

Two ownership systems are compared: one where outsiders own the physical assets of firms and another where these assets are jointly owned by workers. Effort and side payments are self-enforced. Market-wide incentive constraints lead to restrictions on the distribution of profit between capital...

the purpose of this paper is to present leadership as an important mechanism underlying the coordination and the cohesion of communities of practice. More precisely, it will be shown that an important factor conditioning the coordination and the cohesion of a community rests on the leaders’...

The paper analyzes voluntary Free Software/Open Source Software (FS/OSS) organization of work. The empirical setting considered is the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. The paper finds that the production process is hierarchical notwithstanding the modular (nearly decomposable) architecture of...

In order to implement and comply with food safety and traceability regulations, companies may use a number of methods, including specialized information and communications technologies developed for this express purpose. As a result, compliance with regulatory obligations, and the use of...

We model the determinants of who makes decisions, the principal or an agent, when there are multiple decisions. Decision making takes effort and time; and, once implemented, the expected loss from a particular decision (or project) increases with the length of time since the last decision was...