Managerial Leverage is Limited By the Extent of the Market: Hierarchies, Specialization and the Utilization of Lawyers' Human Capital

This paper examines hierarchies’ role in the organization of human-capital-intensive production. We develop an equilibrium model of hierarchical organization, then provide empirical evidence using confidential data on thousands of law offices from the 1992 Census of Services. We show how the equilibrium assignment of individuals to hierarchical positions varies with the degree to which their human capital is field-specialized; then show how this equilibrium changes with the extent of the market. When the extent of the market increases, individuals’ knowledge becomes narrower, but deeper. Managerial leverage, the number of workers per manager, optimally increases to exploit this depth. We find empirical evidence consistent with a central proposition of the model: the share of lawyers that work in hierarchies and the ratio of associates to partners increases as market size increases and lawyers field-specialize. Other results provide evidence against alternative interpretations that emphasize unobserved differences in the distribution of demand or ‘firm size effects’, and lend additional support to the view that a role hierarchies play in legal services is to help exploit increasing returns associated with the utilization of human capital.