Recent sociological analysis of the extent to which modern British society hasbecome more meritocratic raises important conceptual issues for the recurrenteconomic history debate concerning the social mobility of Britain’s business leaders.The majority view in this debate is that high social...

We provide evidence on the match between …rms, managers, and incentives using anew survey that contains information on managers' risk preferences and human capital,on their compensation schemes, and on the …rms they work for. The data is consistentwith the equilibrium correlations predicted by...

Among other areas such as housing and urban renewal, economic development was seen as a key factor in the recovery in Leipzig. The City Department of Economic Development and the Economic Initiative Mitteldeutschland, a lobby group representing large regional employers, designed a cluster...

When should expertise be shared in markets and when in …firms? Knowl-edge exchanges in the market involve less information about the quality ofthe provider's expertise, but facilitate good utilization of experts knowledge.In a …rm, management holds soft information about individuals...

This paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine lawfirms' field boundaries. We find that the share of lawyers working in field-specializedfirms increases as market size increases and lawyers field-specialize, indicating thattransaction costs among lawyers, and not...

An organization will often use a specialized technical language that is un-derstood by its members but not by others. We develop a theory of optimalorganizational languages and identify a key trade-o¤ between facilitatinginternal communication and encouraging communication with other...

A large theoretical literature focuses on the question: What determines firms’ boundaries?Recently, Garicano and Santos and Holmstrom and Milgrom have proposed theories in whichfirms’ boundaries reflect the division of labor across individuals. This paper discussesstrategies for generating...

Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the“information” and “communication” components together. We show theoretically and empirically thatthese have very different effects on the empowerment of employees, and by extension on wageinequality....