(UGTF), replacing Professor Laura Demsetz. They followed up with UGTF Co-Chair Ellen Meltzer to categorize recommendations as to their ease of implementation and controversial character. The Committee on the Library (LIBR) discussed all recommendations; a list of LIBR's endorsements is attached. University Librarian (UL) Gerald Lowell said he fully supports the recommendations and is researchin...

Ronald Coase’s landmark 1937 article, ‘‘The Nature of the Firm,’’ framed the study of organizational economics for decades. Coase asked three fundamental questions: Why do firms exist? What determines their boundaries? How should firms be organized internally? To answer the first question, Coase famously appealed to ‘‘the costs of using the price mechanism,’’ what we now call transaction costs ...

A fter a brief lull in the early 1990s, the market for corporate control became increasingly active toward the end of the decade. Both 1996 and 1997 set new records for the number of U.S. merger filings, and 1998, 1999, and 2000 brought high-profile “mega-mergers” in financial services, energy, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and automobiles. In banking alone, for example, a wave of merger...

This paper investigates the rationale for public intervention in the terrorism insurance market. It argues that government subsidies for terror insurance are aimed, in part, at discouraging self-protection and limiting the negative externalities associated with self-protection. Cautious self-protective behavior by a target can hurt public goods like national prestige if it is seen as “giving in...

Exploiting the historical variations in the structure of the international co ee bean market, I separately identify the e ects of an international cartel agreement and the emergence of a fringe exporting country on the market power and the commodity's price. The results suggest that, of the 75-percent drop in the real co ee price between 1988 and 2001, the cartel's breakdown explains 49 points ...

We provide new evidence regarding the relationship between ownership and corporate performance by modelling the relationship between changes in these variables. The paper commences by confirming the results reported by Demsetz and Villalonga (2001) when modelling the relationship between ownership and performance levels. Fitting a generalised nonlinear model that nests models advanced previousl...

From the early literature on the role of firm managers (Alchian and Demsetz 1972) to the industrial organisation on contracts and mechanism design (Laffont and Martimort 2009), economists have given a lot of attention to find solutions to the imperfect alignment between individuals’ incentives and an organisation’s collective goals (Prendergast 1999). In that literature a key role of managers i...

This thesis takes the micro-economic notion of flexibility in the firm, and seeks to describe formally its significant features. It develops a theoretical approach to flexibility in a behavioural model of the firm, following the principles set down by Herbert Simon in his work on complex systems. This approach is then applied to the small entrepreneurial firm, (S.E.F.), taking fish processing a...

We provide a dynamic model of natural resource management where the optimal institutional structure that governs resource use changes with resource depletion. Copeland and Taylor (2009) analyze how characteristics of a natural resource determine whether its steady-state management regime is open access, communal property, or private property. We extend this and other studies of endogenous insti...