This paper proposes a different theory of the firm and demonstrates how it can be employed to yield hypotheses about differences in innovation and human resource strategy according to the shareholder/stakeholder and liberal/coordinated market dichotomies. The theory assumes that feasible...

Under traditional agency law doctrine, employees are agents of their employers and owe an agent's concomitant fiduciary duties. Employers, in turn, are merely principals and have no corresponding fiduciary duties. A new wave of thinking has unsettled this approach by concluding that only...

Our food supply rests on a foundation of agricultural seed. As the world races to meet soaring food demand, the development and control of this fundamental genetic resource will be of critical concern to the entire human community. Seed, once treated as a shared public good and natural resource,...

In a deregulatory environment, what do regulated firms do? The standard assumption is simple: firms revert to their preregulatory form. This Essay challenges that basic assumption. Increasingly, regulation is conducted through broad standards foisted on firms to implement internally. Congress...

This paper develops a simple general equilibrium model which establishes a link between the patience of economic agents and the well-being of nations. We show that firms in long-term oriented countries can mitigate hold-up inefficiencies by engaging with their suppliers in relational contracting...

In this paper we investigate a rationale for co-evolution of financial and technological structures in modern firms according to the Comparative Institutional Analysis Approach (CIA). Starting from the 'Transaction Costs Approach' (TCE) to the analysis of the relationship between corporate...

The influential empirical literature based on the job-demand-control theory finds a strong relationship between an employee’s control over their work (autonomy), the demands of the job, and negative health outcomes such as depression. Previous studies have neglected the possible endogeneity of...

Does the matching between workers and jobs help explain productivity differentials across firms? To address this question we develop a job-worker allocation quality measure (JAQ) by combining employer-employee administrative data with machine learning techniques. The proposed measure is...

Does the matching between workers and jobs help explain productivity differentials across firms? To address this question we develop a job-worker allocation quality measure (JAQ) by combining employer-employee administrative data with machine learning techniques. The proposed measure is...

This paper describes how entrepreneurial firms can use superior architectural knowledge to open up a technical system to gain strategic advantage. The strategy involves, first, identifying “bottlenecks” in the existing system, and then creating a new open architecture that isolates the...