Welfare to work policy is central to British reforms of itswelfare state and social security system. We are not alonein our desire to assist unemployed and other claimants tofind and retain work. It is therefore important to be able tolook to other countries and consider lessons that could...

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...

We examine how information technology (IT) contributes to organizational change,labor demand, and improved productivity in the public sector using a new paneldata set of police departments covering 1987-2003. While IT adoption is associatedwith increased administrative and organizational...

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...

Why do firms decide to offshore certain parts of their production process? Whatqualifies certain countries as particularly attractive locations to offshore? In thispaper we address these questions with a theory of international production hierarchiesin which organizations arise endogenously to...

An organization will often use a specialized technical language that is un-derstood by its members but not by others. We develop a theory of optimalorganizational languages and identify a key trade-o¤ between facilitatinginternal communication and encouraging communication with other...

This paper examines hierarchies’ role in the organization of human-capital-intensive productionWe develop an equilibrium model of hierarchical organization, then provide empirical evidenceusing confidential data on thousands of law offices from the 1992 Census of Services. We showhow the...

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...