Faster courts favor economic development in States with sufficiently constrained executive power, whereas they harm development in States where political power is relatively unconstrained. We document this novel pattern across developing countries, and build a simple model of the State as a...

A key strategic decision for many firms is the breadth of their relationships with partners. Existing theories of relationship scope are limited in that they disregard two key aspects of interfirm networks: (1) that most firms transact within networks of multiple partners, and (2) that these...

As documented by Macauley (1963) and others, informal contracts are pervasive in modern economies. Yet, systematic empirical evidence on them is still limited. In this paper, we provide a framework to investigate the determinants and consequences of informal contracts. First, we present a model...

This paper develops a model of relational contracting to help explain the prevalence of multiunit franchising; a phenomenon not fully understood in the literature. The model is used to derive a key prediction, which is that franchise systems with a greater propensity to engage in multiunit...

This paper studies how organizations manage the social comparisons that arise when their employees' pay and tasks, and hence their status vis-à-vis peers, differ. We show that under a "pay transparency policy", the organization may compress pay and distort the employees' tasks to minimize...

Research on collaborative ties in business markets has pre-dominantly studied how governance forms balance potential gains and transaction hazards within the relationship. Using an incomplete contracting approach, we examine how the OEM trades off gains obtained within the relationship with its...