We present a survey of recent contributions in the empirical organizational economics, focusing on management practices and decentralization. Productivity dispersion between firms and countries has motivated the improved measurement of firm organization across industries and countries. There...

We investigate the strategies, HR attributes and their synergies that are associated with superior performance in service SMEs using data from the UK Tourism Hospitality and Leisure (THL) sector. A major advantage of our analysis is that our sample includes information also on very small firms...

We examine the qualitative and quantitative predictions of a heterogeneous firm model à la Melitz (2003) in the context of the Canada - US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) of 1989. We calibrate our model to the pre-trade liberalization stage, simulate the trade liberalization, and compute the...

Using detailed product-level export data for China and a variant of the Antràs and Helpman (2004) model that includes investments in component search, we examine the sectoral determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) versus foreign outsourcing in export processing trade. We exploit the...

"It is widely acknowledged that the contemporary unemployment problem is very largely a problem of unemployed unskilled workers. This paper argues a. that high levels of unemployment and increasing dispersion in the primary labour income distribution are intimately related; b. that both reflect...

Organizational economics has advanced along two parallel tracks, one concerned with motivating agents with diverging objectives, the other - less developed - with coordinating agents with cognitive limits. This survey focuses on the second strand and on attempts to bring the two strands...

Organizations are increasingly sourcing their business processes through external service providers, a practice known as Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). Worldwide, the current BPO market could be as much as 279 billion and is predicted to continue growing at 25% annually. Academic...

Drawing on the Resource-Based View of the Firm (RBV) the study suggests a set of mainly knowledge-based resources, specific to high technology SMEs, at firm and individual levels, explaining why in the same industry, some firms consistently outperform others in international markets.A conceptual...

In this chapter, we aim to establish whether liberalization and accompanying regulatory arrangements have delivered the expected efficiency gains. In section I, we discuss the theoretical issues and demonstrate that ‘marketable’ yet simplistic arguments in favour of liberalization tend to...

Purpose The method of understanding and managing the diversity within a business is at the heart of the reasoning behind the concept of ‘supply chain segmentation’. The overarching principle is to find economical segments within the diverse product and customer mix and to match...