Over the last 20 years, the success of Japanese manufacturing firms has brought renewed attention to the importance of cost reduction on existing products as a source of productivity growth. This paper uses survey data and field interviews from the auto supply industry to explore the...

Using an original data source, this paper investigates the circumstances under which firms adopt computer numerical control (CNC), an important type of flexible automation which can significantly increase productivity, product variety and quality. The paper shows that arms'-length...

The study examines US-European productivity and worker attitude differences, focusing on changes in incentive structures. We analyze productivity and worker attitudes in five plants in the UK and US belonging to the same multinational producer of automotive sensors and actuators. We examine the...

Some highlights from our original survey data include a wide range in terms of size and strategies of supply chain companies; a majority was small- to medium-sized, often family-owned. We observed barriers to patenting for manufacturing firms developing process rather than product innovations....

Economists have often argued that "pay for performance" is the optimal compensation scheme. However, use of the simplest form of pay for performance, the piece rate, has been in decline in manufacturing in recent decades. We show both theoretically and empirically that these changes are due to...

This paper draws on a detailed history of Intel's strategy with respect to the complementary markets for microprocessors to explore the usefulness of the current theoretical literature for explaining behavior. We find that as the literature predicts, Intel invests heavily in these markets, both...

Organizational theorists have long acknowledged the importance of the formal and informal incentives facing a firm's employees, stressing that the political economy of a firm plays a major role in shaping organizational life and firm behavior. Yet the detailed study of incentive systems has...

Recent work linking the adoption of key organizational practices to productivity raises an important question: if adoption increases productivity so dramatically, why does adoption across an industry take so long? This paper explores this question in the context of one particularly interesting...

This paper presents empirical evidence that the intensity of research workers' incentives for the distinct tasks of basic and applied research are positively associated with each other. We relate this finding to the prediction of the theoretical literature that when effort is multi-dimensional,...

We examine the impact of publicly funded biomedical research on the in-house research of the for-profit pharmaceutical industry. Qualitative analysis of the history of the discovery and development of a sample of 21 significant drugs, and a program of interviews with senior managers and...