Do political institutions shape the structure of public spending? Based on a sample of 141 elections in eighteen Western European countries over the period 1970-1998, this paper shows that governments’ margin of maneuverability to design and implement fiscal policies depends on the level of...

This is a dictionary entry forthcoming in Peter Newman, ed. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, London: Macmillan, 1998.

We examine a central result in corporate finance – the Modigliani-Miller capital structure irrelevance proposition – from a Coasian property rights perspective. Building upon the work of Coase, Demsetz and Cheung, we develop an enabling methodology to study the impact of positive Coasian...

In hierarchies, agents’ hidden actions increase principals' transactions costs and give rise to a demand for monitoring and enforcement. The fact that the latter are costly raises questions about their scope, organisation, and type. How much control is enough? The paper uses historical records...

This paper studies the adoption of formal contracts as a safeguard mechanism in subcontracting agreements in the Spanish electronic industry, examining its relation with specificity, uncertainty, size, and the existence of other safeguards. The analysis of 74 subcontracting agreements confirms...

Social network ties enable collaborative creation and sharing of ideas between knowledge workers. Thus, these ties play an important role in organizational innovation as well as for the personal success of the innovators. However, scholars tend to focus only on the information benefits,...

The entrepreneurial theory of the firm argues that entrepreneurship, properly understood, is a crucial but neglected element in explaining the nature and boundaries of the firm. By contrast, the theory of the entrepreneurial firm presumably seeks not to understand the nature and boundaries of...

We offer an analysis of the American Revolution in which actors are modeled as choosing the sovereign organization that maximizes their net expected benefits. Benefits of secession derive from satisfaction of greed and settlement of grievance. Costs derive from the cost of civil war and lost...