Support for many R&D and technology policies relies on empirical evidence that R&D “spills over” between firms. But there are two countervailing R&D spillovers: positive effects from technology spillovers and negative effects from business stealing by product market rivals. We develop a...

We argue that social capital as proxied by regional trust and the Rule of Law can improve aggregate productivity through facilitating greater firm decentralization. We collect original data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production and sales decisions from Corporate Head Quarters...

We examine the “home bias” of international knowledge spillovers as measured by the speed of patent citations (i.e. knowledge spreads slowly over international boundaries). We present the first compelling econometric evidence that the geographical localization of knowledge spillovers has...

Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the “information” and “communication” components together. We show theoretically and empirically that these have very different effects on the empowerment of employees, and by extension on wage...

Aimed at energy organizations adapting to the competitive demands associated with liberalization, transaction and risk management software “A-Trade” was part of the shift from a traditional engineer-led culture of risk cognition to market-oriented financial risk management. The story of...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium sized manufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level productivity, profitability, Tobin’s Q, sales growth and survival...

This paper develops a framework to analyze the relationship between the diffusion of new technologies and the decentralization decisions of firms. Centralized control relies on the information of the principal, which we equate with publicly available information. Decentralized control, on the...