The Industrial Revolution continues to be analysed by economic historians deploying the conceptual vocabularies of modern social science, particularly economics. Their approach which gives priority to the elaboration of causes and processes of evolution is far too often and superficially...

What is the origin and essence of fashion? This question has engaged scholars of various disciplines over the past decades, most of whom approach this subject with a Western or European focus. This paper argues instead that Asia was also pivotal in the articulation of the fashion system in...

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

Large companies are usually organized into business units, yet some activitiesare almost always centralized in a company-wide functional unit. We firstshow that organizations endogenously create an incentive conflict between functionalmanagers (who desire excessive standardization) and...

When should expertise be shared in markets and when in …firms? Knowl-edge exchanges in the market involve less information about the quality ofthe provider's expertise, but facilitate good utilization of experts knowledge.In a …rm, management holds soft information about individuals...

Changes in information and communication technologieshave increased the offshorability of tasks.As routine tasks (Pol Antràs, Luis Garicano and EstebanRossi-Hansberg, 2006) and lower offshoring-costtasks (Gene Grossman and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg,2008) move abroad, production processes become...

This paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine lawfirms' field boundaries. We find that the share of lawyers working in field-specializedfirms increases as market size increases and lawyers field-specialize, indicating thattransaction costs among lawyers, and not...

We present an equilibrium theory of the organization of work in an economywhere knowledge is an essential input in production and agents are heterogeneousin skill. Agents organize production by matching with others in knowledgehierarchies designed to use and communicate their knowledge...

The knowledge economy is nothing new. As Chandler’s (1977) classic study documents,improvements in communication technology (e.g. mail via railways, thetelegraph, and later the telephone) played a key role in the emergence of the modernAmerican corporation in the late 19th century and the...

How does the formation of cross-country teams affect the organization of workand the structure of wages? To study this question, we propose a theory of theassignment of heterogeneous agents into hierarchical teams, where less skilledagents specialize in production and more skilled agents...