We study ex post outsourcing of production in an imperfectly discriminating contest, interpreted here as a research tournament or a procurement contest for being awarded some production contract. We find that the possibility of outsourcing increases competition between the contestants, leading...

We investigate the link between productivity of firms and their sourcing behavior. Following Antràs & Helpman (2004) we distinguish between domestic and foreign sourcing, as well as between outsourcing and vertical integration. A firm’s choice is driven by a hold-up problem caused by lack of...

We develop a theory of a firm in an incomplete contracts environment which decides on its complexity, organization, and global scale. Specifically, the firm decides i) how thinly it wants to slice its production process by choosing the mass of symmetric intermediate inputs that are...

Recent studies indicate that firms often outsource standard and simple tasks, while keeping complex and important inputs inside their boundaries. This observation is difficult to reconcile with the property rights approach of the firm, which suggests that important components should be...

We examine the incentives and implications of supplier encroachment, when final good produc-tion requires the use of multiple complementary inputs and the entry of a supplier into the final good market gives rise to mutual outsourcing of inputs between the encroaching supplier and the incumbent....

This paper explores why competing firms can choose to outsource to an external common supplier that does not have a cost advantage in input production. The supplier, through its contract offers, manages to generate asymmetry, to alter product market competition, and to extract profits from the...

We use census data to show that structural transformation reflects a fundamental reallocation of labor from goods to services, instead of a relabelling that occurs when goods-producing firms outsource their in-house service production. The novelty of our approach is that it categorizes labor by...

In this paper, we investigate distortions created by turnover taxes. As a natural experiment, we explore a reform that replaced turnover taxes with value-added taxes for some service industries in China, while the taxation of manufacturing industries remained unchanged. The reform increased...