The recent fall of labor's share of GDP in numerous countries is well-documented, but its causes are poorly understood. We sketch a "superstar firm" model where industries are increasingly characterized by "winner take most" competition, leading a small number of highly profitable (and low labor...

The fall of labor's share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well documented but its causes remain uncertain. Existing empirical assessments of trends in labor's share typically have relied on industry or macro data, obscuring heterogeneity among firms. In...

Conventional wisdom depicts corruption as a tax on incumbent firms. This paper challenges this view in two ways. First, by arguing that corruption matters not so much because of the value of the bribe ("tax"), but because of another less studied feature of corruption, namely bribe...

A worker co-operative is a firm that is owned and managed by those who work in it. This paper provides a selective review of research in economics on worker cooperatives. It concentrates on the volatility of earnings and employment in the co-ops compared with conventional capitalist firms; on...

In this paper we identify two situations that can lead a firm to hire an executive who supports a corporate culture that differs from the firm's current culture. In the first case, there is similarity between the firm's culture and that of the candidate and in the second case, executives who...

We use data from over 20,000 firms in 60 countries to identify constraints on the growth of firms. We interpret managers' answers to survey questions on the extent to which various aspects of their external environment inhibit the performance of their firm as measuring the shadow cost of...

This paper documents the relationship between firm survival and three types of international trade activities - exports, imports and two-way trade. It uses unique new representative data for manufacturing enterprises from Germany, one of the leading actors on the world market for goods, that...