This paper analyses the impact of labour demand and labour market regulations on the corporate structure of fims. It finds that higher wages are associated with lower monitoring, irrespective of whether these high wages are caused by labour market regulations, unions or higher labour demand....

In the 'Knightian' theory of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs provide insurance to workers by paying fixed wages and bear all the risk of production. This paper endogenizes entrepreneurial risk by allowing for optimal insurance contracts as well as the occupational self-selection. Moral hazard...

Progress in the application of matching models to environments in which the utility between matching partners is not fully transferable has been hindered by a lack of characterization results analogous to those that are known for transferable utility. We present sufficient conditions for...

We present a perfectly-competitive model of firm boundary decisions and study their interplay with product demand, technology, and welfare. Integration is pri- vately costly but is effective at coordinating production decisions; non-integration is less costly, but coordinates relatively poorly....

What is the relationship between product prices and vertical integration? While the literature has focused on how integration affects prices, this paper shows that prices can affect integration. Many theories in organizational economics and industrial organization posit that integration, while...

This paper studies the aggregate economic effects of diversity policies such as affirmative action in college admission. If agents are constrained in the side payments they can make, the free market allocation displays excessive segregation relative to the first-best. Affirmative action policies...

We construct a price-theoretic model of firms' integration decisions under perfect competition and study their interplay with consumer demand and welfare. Integration is costly to implement but is effective at coordinating production decisions. The price of output influences the ownership...

We provide a simple framework for analysing how organizations are designed in a competitive economy. We focus on the allocation of rights of control and show that in the presence of liquidity constraints, transferring authority can serve as an effective means of transferring surplus, although...

We embed a simple incomplete-contracts model of organization design in a standard two-country perfectly-competitive trade model to examine how the liberalization of product and factor markets affects the ownership structure of firms. In our model, managers decide whether or not to integrate...

We study how trade policy affects firms’ ownership structures. We embed an incom- plete contracts model of vertical integration choices into a standard perfectly-competitive international trade framework. Integration decisions are driven by a trade-off between the pecuniary benefits of...