Under the independence and competence assumptions of Condorcet’s classical jury model, the probability of a correct majority decision converges to certainty as the jury size increases, a seemingly unrealistic result. Using Bayesian networks, we argue that the model’s independence assumption...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium sized manufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level productivity, profitability, Tobin’s Q, sales growth and survival...

In this paper we investigate the evolution of quality adjusted prices for servers motivated by two facts. First, the productivity acceleration in the US economy since the mid 1990s is closely linked to spread of information technology of which networked computing is a large component. Second,...

Although there is a large literature on the economic effects of minimum wages on labour market outcomes (especially employment), there is hardly any evidence on their impact on firm performance. This is surprising: minimum wages appear to have a significant impact on wages, but only a limited...

This paper develops a framework to analyze the relationship between the diffusion of new technologies and the decentralization decisions of firms. Centralized control relies on the information of the principal, which we equate with publicly available information. Decentralized control, on the...

Government policies to support R&D are predicated on empirical evidence of R&D "spillovers" between firms. But there are two countervailing R&D spillovers: positive effects from technology spillovers and negative effects from business stealing by product market rivals. We develop a general...

Since China maintains a certain degree of independence in the world economy, it is not necessarily impossible to reverse what David Harvey called "spatial fix" of capitalism. For example, to raise the wage by the "politics of price", and to provide price protection to direct producers, can add...

We examine the robustness of information cascades in laboratory experiments. Apart from the situation in which each player can obtain a signal for free (as in the experiment by Anderson and Holt (1997), the case of costly signals is studied where players decide whether or not to obtain private...

In this article I argue that the organizational involvement of large scale information technology packages, such as those known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), has important implications that go far beyond the acknowledged effects of keeping the organizational operations accountable and...

Economies that are more open to trade and foreign direct investment face greater competitive pressure than closed ones. Globalization critics are concerned that this pressure induces countries to lower labor standards in order to remain competitive and retain or attract foreign investment....