This paper investigates the formation of production and trading networks in economies with general interdependencies and complex property rights. We argue that the right to exclude, a core tenet of property, grants asset owners local monopoly power that is amplified by an economy's endogenous...

This paper investigates the formation of production and trading networks in an economy with general interdependencies and complex property rights. The right to exclude,a core tenet of property, grants asset owners a form of monopoly power that influences granular economic interactions....

Europe is reorganizing its international value chain. I document these changes in Europe's international organization of production with new survey data of Austrian and German firms investing in Eastern Europe. I show estimates of the share of intra-firm trade between Austria and Germany on the...

Europe is reorganizing its international value chain. I document these changes in Europe's international organization of production with new survey data of Austrian and German firms investing in Eastern Europe. I show estimates of the share of intrafirm trade between Austria or Germany on the...

The property-rights theory assumes that trade is non-contractible ex-ante and focusses exclusively on the allocation of property-rights. We derive foundations for this focus on property-rights by identifying scenarios where only one of the simple ownership structures is optimal even though trade...

If, as Hume argues, property is a self-referring custom of a group of people, then property rights depend on how that group forms and orders itself. In this paper we investigate how people construct a convention for property in an experiment in which groups of self-selected individuals can...

This paper proposes that transaction costs and capabilities are fundamentally intertwined in the determination of vertical scope, and identifies the key mechanisms of their co-evolution. Specifically, we argue that capability differences are a necessary condition for vertical specialization; and...

If contracting within the firm is incomplete, managers will expend resources on trying to appropriate a share of the surplus that is generated. We show that outside ownership may alleviate the deadweight losses associated with such costly distributional conflict, even if all it does is add...

The paper deals with development of a general theory of the firm. It discusses the demand for such a theory, reviews existing approaches to its generalization, and offers a new variant of general theory of the firm based on the contract theory. The theory is based on minimization of...