From 1997 to 2001 we observe in the Usa a faster growth in the number of Nonemploye firms (NF) vis à vis Employer firms (EF). The diverse speed of net entry may be due to particular internal organisation of the two types of firms and the effect that this has on the reactions to market...

We deal with efficient allocation of the shut-down decision of a firm in which there is profit sharing. The paper can be considered as a complement to the literature on the endogenous ownership structure of the firm. We examine a variety of cases according to both different schemes of layoff...

The main issue is the organisation of firms when different degrees of labour participation are taken into account. We start reviewing the literature on the LM firm. We then consider a less radical labour participation, i.e. the Aoki firm. We survey extensions of the Aoki's firm to the case of...

Firms grant to their employees non-tradable stock options as an incentive device. Is the opportunity cost of issuing these options equal to the amount the company would receive if it sold the same options to outside investors? No, it is not, since the options granted to employees are non...

Aoki's profit sharing firm organization is associated with the option evaluation model of investment. The firm is endowed with a shut down option it can exercise when the market price, assumed uncertain, falls below a certain trigger level. The distributive parameter is the result of a...

We analyse the behavior of a firm where workers share profits with shareholders by using a model cast in an Aoki framework. Our firm faces two sorts of uncertainty: one relates to the market price assumed to follow a random walk in continuous time and the other relates to internal organization,...

One of the main reasons why workers' enterprises (WE) still represent a relevant chunk of the economy may lay in some affinities with conventional profit maximizing firms. To prove this, we compare the entry policies of WEs and conventional firms when they can decide size at entry while having...

The main aim of the paper is to highlight the relation between flexibility and vertical integration. To this purpose, we go through the selection of the optimal degree of vertical disintegration of a flexible firm which operates in a dynamic uncertain environment. The enterprise we model enjoys...

We investigate the relationship between the extent of vertical flexibility and the underlying financial choices of a firm. By vertical flexibility we mean the opportunity to outsource a necessary input and to reverse the choice as input market conditions dictate. A firm simultaneously selects...