Researchers commonly assume that business groups, a ubiquitous organizational form in emerging markets, permit affiliated firms to share risk by smoothing income flows and by reallocating money from one affiliate to another in times of distress. This view has received support in the literature...

Property rights over knowledge and its output--intellectual property rights--are often weak. We treat the strength of property rights as a primitive of the environment. We examine the effects of the strengths of these rights on the structure of contracts and relationships employed by firms in...