We study contractual arrangements that support an efficient use of time in a knowledge-intensive economy in which agents endogenously specialize in either production or consulting. The resulting market for advice is plagued by informational problems, since both the difficulty of the questions...

Guided by theories of management by exception, we study the impact of Information and Communication Technology on worker and plant manager autonomy and on span of control. We find, using an original dataset of American and European manufacturing firms, that better information technologies...

A major empirical challenge in economics is to identify how regulations (such as firing costs) affect economic efficiency. Almost all countries have regulations that increase costs when firms cross a discrete size threshold. We show how these size-contingent regulations can be used to identify...

In this paper we use insights from organizational economics and financial regulation to study the optimal architecture of supervision. We suggest that the new architecture should revolve around the following principles: (i) banking, securities and insurance supervision should be further...

We bridge a gap between organizational economics and strategy research by developing a task-based approach to analyze organizational knowledge, process and structure, and deriving testable implications for the relation between production and organizational structure. We argue that organization...

An expert must train a novice. The novice initially has no cash, so he can only pay the expert with the accumulated surplus from his production. At any time, the novice can leave the relationship with his acquired knowledge and produce on his own. The sole reason he does not is the prospect of...

We introduce a novel empirical strategy to measure credit shocks. Theoretically, we show that credit shocks reduce the value of long term investments relative to short term ones. Under the (conservative) assumption that demand shocks affect short and long run investments similarly, credit shocks...

We examine how information technology (IT) contributes to organizational change, labor demand, and improved productivity in the public sector using a new panel data set of police departments covering 1987-2003. While IT adoption is associated with increased administrative and organizational...

About 10% of US employees now regularly work from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to "shirking from home." We report the results of a WFH experiment at CTrip, a 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency. Call center employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly...

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly chosen...