Recent literature on international trade has established that the most productive firms become multinationals. But our data reveal a startling variation in productivity levels of foreign affliates across the countries in Eastern Europe of the same European multinational parent firms suggesting...

The paper analyzes the choice of organizational structure as solution to the trade-off between controlling behavior based on authority rights and minimizing costs for implementing high efforts. The analysis includes the owner of a firm, a top manager and two division heads. If it is more...

Recent years have witnessed an enormous amount of reorganization of the corporate sector in the US and in Europe. This paper examines the role of market competition for this trend in corporate reorganization. We find that at intermediate levels of competition the CEO of the corporation decides...

We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A judicious definition of status categories can be used by a principal in order to influence the agents' performance. We first consider a pure status case where there...

This paper studies the impact of innovation on the organizational structure. The theoretical framework predicts that a larger parental pool of knowledge raises the probability of offshoring. This holds in a national as well as an international context. However, when the producer loses...

We study the optimal hierarchical structure of an organization under limited commitment. The organization cannot make a long term commitment to wages and output levels, while it can commit to its hierarchical structure. We show that the optimal hierarchical structure is horizontal when it is...

We incorporate trade in tasks à la Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) into a small open economy version of the theory of firm organization of Marin and Verdier (2012) to examine how offshoring affects the way firms organize. We show that the offshoring of production tasks leads firms to...

What determines whether or not multinational firms transplant their mode of organisation to other countries? We embed the theory of knowledge hierarchies in an industry equilibrium model of monopolistic competition to examine how the economic environment may affect the decision of a...

Corporate organization varies within a country and across countries with country size. The paper starts by establishing some facts about corporate organization based on unique data of 660 Austrian and German corporations. The larger country (Germany) has larger firms with flatter and more...

This paper develops a theory which investigates how firms' choice of corporate organization is affecting firm performance and the nature of competition in international markets. We develop a model in which firms' organisational choices determine heterogeneity across firms in size and...