Globalization has been identified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities and as the emergence of human capital as the new stakeholder of the firm. This paper surveys recent work which examines the role of trade integration for these changes in corporate organization. More...

The aim pursued in this business history study is to assess whether LOEWE - an originally German-Jewish producer of consumer electronics - had the possibility as well as the capacity to build and preserve a learning base throughout the national-socialist period. Learning base is understood here...

Universities in developing countries have rarely been able to subscribe to academic journals in the past. The "Online Access to Research in the Environment" initiative (OARE) provides institutions in developing countries with free online access to more than 5,700 environmental science journals....

We extend Akerlof's (1970) "Market for Lemons" by assuming that some buyers are overconfident. Buyers in our model receive a noisy signal about the quality of the good that is at display for sale. Overconfident buyers do not update according to Bayes' rule but take the noisy signal at face...

The outcome of non-binding reverse auctions critically depends on how information is distributed during the bidding process. We use data from a large European procurement platform to study the impact of different information structures, specifically the availability of quality information to the...

It is often argued that certifiers have an incentive to offer inflated certificates, although they deny it. In this paper, we study a model in which a certifier is paid by sellers, and may offer them inflated certificates, but incurs costs if doing so. We find that the certifier may face a...

Many industrialized economies have seen a rapid rise in top income inequality and in the globalization of production since the 1980s. In this paper I propose an open economy model of executive pay to study how offshoring affects the pay level and incentives of top earners. The model introduces a...

Internal organization relies heavily on psychological consistency requirements. This perspective has been emphasized in modern compensation theory, but has not been extended to organization theory. The idea is developed by starting from Williamson's discussion of idiosyncratic exchange. The...

Recent years have witnessed an enormous amount of reorganization of the corporate sector in the US and in Europe. This paper examines the role of market competition for this trend in corporate reorganization. We find that at intermediate levels of competition the CEO of the corporation decides...

The compensation of executive board members in Germany has become a highly controversial topic since Vodafone's hostile takeover of Mannesmann in 2000 and it is again in the spotlight since the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2009. Based on unique panel data evidence of the 500 largest firms...