After many years of large drops in the cost information and communicationtechnology, the evidence on its impact on productivity growth in non-IT produc-ing sectors continues to be mixed.We propose a framework to study the impactof information and communication technology on growth through its...

We examine how information technology (IT) contributes to organizational change,labor demand, and improved productivity in the public sector using a new paneldata set of police departments covering 1987-2003. While IT adoption is associatedwith increased administrative and organizational...

Why do firms decide to offshore certain parts of their production process? Whatqualifies certain countries as particularly attractive locations to offshore? In thispaper we address these questions with a theory of international production hierarchiesin which organizations arise endogenously to...

This paper examines hierarchies’ role in the organization of human-capital-intensive productionWe develop an equilibrium model of hierarchical organization, then provide empirical evidenceusing confidential data on thousands of law offices from the 1992 Census of Services. We showhow the...

Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (2003) show that knowledge-based hierarchies arecharacterized by positive sorting between workers and managers when knowledgeacquisition takes place before production. We extend the analysis and find thatcomplementarities between manager and worker skill are even...

This paper is concerned with the effect of nonmonetary incentiveson behavior, in particular with the study of social pressure as adeterminant of corruption. We offer empirical evidence that shows howprofessional soccer referees favor home teams in order to satisfy thecrowds in the stadium....

This paper studies the matching of opportunities with talent when costly diagnosisconfers an informational advantage to the agent undertaking it. When this agentis under-qualified, adverse selection prevents efficient referrals through fixed-pricecontracts. Spot-market contracts that rely on...

Since the seminal work of Katz and Murphy (1992), the study of wage inequalityhas taken as its starting point a neoclassical CES production function using as inputscapital and low and high skill labor. This approach assumes that the organization ofproduction is fixed and determined by a...

A large theoretical literature focuses on the question: What determines firms’ boundaries?Recently, Garicano and Santos and Holmstrom and Milgrom have proposed theories in whichfirms’ boundaries reflect the division of labor across individuals. This paper discussesstrategies for generating...

This paper presents a framework to analyze the potential changes in transaction costs due to theintroduction of e-commerce on transactions between businesses. It then illustrates and applies thisframework using internal data from an Internet-based firm to measure process improvements,marketplace...