Governments frequently offer multinational companies various incentives in the hope that they will generate benefits to the local economy. But evidence of these benefits remains inconclusive. Do foreign owners actually improve technical efficiency at acquired firms or are they driven more by...

The paper investigates the conditions under which consumer ownership should be preferred to investor ownership in economies with externalities. On making their choices investor-owners take into account producer surplus only, while consumer-owners take into account both producer and consumer...

I study the effects of minority equity ownership by firms in their trade partners. Passive ownership promotes relationship-specific investments by both parties and increases the joint surplus. The relative attractiveness of partial backward vs. forward ownership depends on the specific nature of...

Like many professional sports leagues worldwide, the National Basketball Association is organized as a cooperative of team owners. We argue that league ownership structures must balance two types of transaction costs: the costs of contracting with stakeholders of the league, importantly players,...

Rationales for a stakeholder model of corporate governance are based on enlightened self-interest, moral imperative, and/or externalities. Of these, the externalities rationale holds the most promise to justify a stakeholder focus. Recent evidence, however, indicates that the benefits of a...

We examine decentralization -- that is, the use of more than one decision maker -- in small- to medium-sized organizations, with a particular focus on family firms. Our estimation results suggest that larger firms decentralize more often, as do firms with newer owners, organizations with a...

In a model where privatization of inefficient SOE's is performed by allocating shares to different types of agents in society we analyze the conflict between shareholder and stakeholder interests. In particular, some of those that receive shares in a firm that suffers from inefficiency do have a...

In this paper it is argued that privatization is not the only alternative to public ownership. Adopting the incomplete contract approach, it is shown that partial privatization may well be the optimal ownership structure. While in the standard incomplete contract model joint ownership is usually...

A fundamental question for economics is why large firms in market economies usually assign control rights to capital suppliers rather than labor suppliers. A diverse collection of answers can be found in the literature. But unfortunately little theoretical consensus has emerged, and few attempts...