This paper investigates the role of the market for knowledge in shaping firm hierarchy—that is, the span of control and the number of layers. We predict that, the larger the extent of the market for knowledge, the larger the span of control and the fewer the layers. We test our predictions...

Organizational agility and decision-making are critical in today’s dynamic business environment, but overemphasis on hierarchy and bureaucracy can hinder both. This article presents the find- ings of a study that examined the negative impact of overemphasis on hierarchy and bureaucracy on...

The paper examines allocation of a resource in "hierarchies", where individuals are exogenously ordered and those ranked higher in the ordering make claim on the resource earlier. Individuals get strictly increasing and strictly concave payoff from resource extracted, giving rise to endogenous...

This paper proposes a new link relating export destinations and the organization of the firm. We claim that the production of higher-quality varieties exported to rich destinations induces firms to restructure their production processes, becoming organizationally more complex. We introduce a...

Theories of political accountability often consider voter-politician interactions in isolation from politician-bureaucrat interactions. We study a model of electoral accountability with a governing hierarchy: voter-politician-bureaucrat. The politician and bureaucrat both produce government...

A large literature suggests that incentive pay and delegation of worker authority are positively related. Using data from a large cross section of British establishments, we show that the positive relationship found in the empirical literature masks a stark difference across jobs. Classifying...