In an analysis of the formation of unions within a single firm, this paper addresses conditions under which encompassing unions form. It is shown that a production function satisfying decreasing marginal productivity leads to the formation of encompassing unions. This result holds for different...

Distinguimos entre educación para la calidad y entrenamiento para la calidad. A través de la educación, aprendemos la 'filosofía' de la calidad; a través del entrenamiento, aprendemos sus herramientas. Así, el aprendizaje es un concepto central de este artículo. Pero no es el único. Para...

Promoting investments in energy saving technologies is an important means forachieving environmental goals. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence on successconditions of policies isscarce. Based on a survey among Dutch firms, this paper sets out to identify thefactors that determine the...

This paper examines the small world hypothesis. The first part of the paper presents empirical evidence on the evolution of a particular world: the world of journal publishing economists during the period 1970-2000. We find that in the 1970's the world of economics was a collection of islands....

The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly, in 1997, the sector association started with a voluntary benchmarking aimed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Secondly, merger activity arose. This paper develops a tailored...

We model entrepreneurship and the emergence of firms as a result of simultaneous bidding for labor services among heterogeneousagents. Unique to our approach is that occupational choices, jobmatching and organizational forms are determined simultaneously, sothat the opportunity costs of...

We develop a new perspective on the boundary of the firm that is consistent with the empirical observation that the share of entrepreneurs first decreases and then increases in the course of economic development. Existing theory based on transaction costs is difficult to relate to these...

In this laboratory experiment we study the use of strategic ignorance to delegate real authority within a firm. A worker can gather information on investment projects, while a manager makes the implementation decision. The manager can monitor the worker. This allows her to better exploit the...

This paper exploits micro firm level data to examine the impact of spatial clustering and links to foreign buyer networks on firm performance in the wood furniture industry in Central Java, Indonesia. The analysis is based on an annual manufacturing survey. We identify the impact of...

Analyzing a comprehensive database of limited liability manufacturing firms this paper investigates the relation between a firm's financial situation and its conditional expected growth rate. Specifically, using quantile regressions, we obtain a quantitative characterization of this relation for...