Although the determinants of income are complex, the results are surprisingly uniform. To a first approximation, top incomes follow a power-law distribution, and the redistribution of income corresponds to a change in the power-law exponent. Given the messiness of the struggle for resources, why...

What makes the rich different? Are they more productive, as mainstream economists claim? I offer another explanation. What makes the rich different, I propose, is hierarchical power. The rich command hierarchies. The poor do not. It is this greater control over subordinates, I hypothesize, that...

Nowadays, it is commonplace to claim that the economy overuses our limited material and energy resources and that this overuse threatens both human society and the biosphere. Other than anti-science cranks, the only ones who seem to deny this claim are mainstream economists. In our view, though,...

Humanity's most pressing need is to learn how to live within our planet's boundaries - something that likely means doing without economic growth. How, then, can we create a non-growth society that is both just and equitable? I attempt to address this question by looking at an aspect of...

Agents participating in different kind of organizations, usually take different positions in some network structure. Two well-known network structures are hierarchies and communication networks. We give an overview of the most common models of communication and hierarchy restrictions in...

According to neoclassical economics, the most efficient way to organize human activity is to use the free market. By stoking self interest, the theory claims, individuals can benefit society. This idea, however, conflicts with the evolutionary theory of multilevel selection, which proposes that...

Although the determinants of income are complex, the results are surprisingly uniform. To a first approximation, top incomes follow a power-law distribution, and the redistribution of income corresponds to a change in the power-law exponent. Given the messiness of the struggle for resources, why...

Although the determinants of income are complex, the results are surprisingly uniform. To a first approximation, top incomes follow a power-law distribution, and the redistribution of income corresponds to a change in the power-law exponent. Given the messiness of the struggle for resources, why...

Humanity's most pressing need is to learn how to live within our planet's boundaries - something that likely means doing without economic growth. How, then, can we create a non-growth society that is both just and equitable? I attempt to address this question by looking at an aspect of...

Agents participating in different kind of organizations, usually take different positions in some network structure. Two well-known network structures are hierarchies and communication networks. We give an overview of the most common models of communication and hierarchy restrictions in...

Der vorliegende Beitrag befasst sich mit der Soziographie der Arbeitszufriedenheit. In Studien zur Arbeitszufriedenheit werden oziographische Merkmale oft als Kontrollgrößen eingesetzt. Ihre Berücksichtigung bei der Datenanalyse soll die Frage beantworten, ob sich der Einfluss von...

The main function of hierarchies is to coordinate activities within an organisation, but a hierarchical structure also provides work incentives, by offering the prospect of hierarchical mobility. An alternative way for organisations to motivate workers is through job design. In organisations...

We merge firm-level data on ownership linkages with administrative data on German workers to analyze how the position in a business group hierarchy affects workers' wages. To acknowledge that ownership linkages are not onedirectional, we propose an index of hierarchical distance to the ultimate...

Economic sociologists have rarely studied organizational reasons why market design processes fail. Drawing on the organizational literature on mistakes and accidents, the paper identifies such reasons for a fatal design decision during the creation of California’s first electricity markets....

We merge firm-level data on ownership linkages with administrative data on German workers to analyze how the position in a business group hierarchy affects workers' wages. To acknowledge that ownership linkages are not onedirectional, we propose an index of hierarchical distance to the ultimate...

Distributional constraints are common features in many real matching markets, such as medical residency matching, school admissions, and teacher assignment. We develop a general theory of matching mechanisms under distributional constraints. We identify the necessary and sufficient condition on...

Based on worldly experience, most people would agree that firms are hierarchically organized, and that pay tends to increase as one moves up the hierarchy. But how this hierarchical structure affects income distribution has not been widely studied. To remedy this situation, this paper presents a...

States require money to function and therefore every government has to continuously raise new funds. On the financial markets, governments cannot be sure that auctions of their debt will be sufficiently attractive to financial investors, which is why governments usually enter into cooperative...

Free markets are, according to neoclassical economic theory, the most efficient way of organizing human activity. The claim is that individuals can benefit society by acting only in their self interest. In contrast, the evolutionary theory of multilevel selection proposes that groups must...

According to the theory of capital as power, capitalism, like any other mode of power, is born through sabotage and lives in chains – and yet everywhere we look we see it grow and expand. What explains this apparent puzzle of ‘growth in the midst of sabotage’? The answer, we argue, begins...

Three basic variants of the strategy for ensuring corporate security of an industrial enterprise ('survival', 'stabilization' and 'support') are proposed, the choice of one of which is associated with the results of assessing the level of corporate security. By applying the hierarchy analysis...

When members of an organization share communication codes, coordination across subunits is easier. But if groups interact separately, they will each develop a specialized code. This paper asks: Can organizations shape how people interact in order to create shared communication codes? What kinds...

We investigate how crackdowns on regulatory enforcement dynamically influence firm behavior by linking the timing of centralized dispatch of environmental inspectors to cities in China with high-frequency observations of air pollution at coal power plants. During weeks when inspection teams are...

If Anne knows more than Bob about the state of the world, she may or may not know what Bob thinks, but it is always possible that she does. In other words, if the distribution of Anne's belief about the state is a mean-preserving spread of the distribution of Bob's belief, we can construct...

New forms of labour intermediation through digital platforms such as Uber, Deliveroo or Amazon Mechanical Turk can be conceptualised as the latest stage of a long-lasting process of disaggregation of the firm and “disorganisation of labour law.” In particular, the rise of platform-mediated...

One of the persistent gaps between FDI spill overs and firm competitive advantage literature is a unified analysis of the role that various factors play in the local firms' ability to maintain or enhance performance in their competitive environment. This study examines foreign competition,...

In this paper, we investigate the place of Islamic investment securities (sukuk) in firms' financial hierarchy using the modified pecking order theory. We study the external funding preferences of Malaysian firms using quarterly data of 112 firms for the period between 2005 and 2017. We find...

We argue that China, with its long history, a relatively stable political system, and multiple regime changes, provides us an opportunity to investigate the political economy of administrative hierarchy. Using prefecture-level panel data and exploiting regime changes during AD1000-2000, we find...

Free markets are, according to neoclassical economic theory, the most efficient way of organizing human activity. The claim is that individuals can benefit society by acting only in their self interest. In contrast, the evolutionary theory of multilevel selection proposes that groups must...

States require money to function and therefore every government has to continuously raise new funds. On the financial markets, governments cannot be sure that auctions of their debt will be sufficiently attractive to financial investors, which is why governments usually enter into cooperative...

This paper analyzes whether workplace employee representation (ER) affects the design of firm hierarchies. We rationalize the role of ER within a knowledge-based model of hierarchies, where the firm's choice of hierarchical layers depends on the trade-off between communication and knowledge...

Three basic variants of the strategy for ensuring corporate security of an industrial enterprise (“survival”, “stabilization” and “support”) are proposed, the choice of one of which is associated with the results of assessing the level of corporate security. By applying the hierarchy...

The link between organizational structure and innovation has been a longstanding interest of organizational scholars, yet the exact nature of the relationship has not been clearly established. Drawing on the behavioral theory of the firm, we take a process view and examine how hierarchy of...

This article examines the relationship of executive level ties between firms and firm behavior. By doing so, the article places an emphasis on elites within corporations as actors in policy-making in a field that has been largely state-centric in its analysis. Taking corporate interests into the...