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We examine an infi nitely repeated game between a principal, who has the formal authority to decide on a project, and a biased agent, who is privately informed about what projects are available. The optimal relational contract speaks to how power is earned, lost, and retained. It shows that entrenched power structures are consistent with optimal administration of power. And it provides new perspectives on why similar firms organize differently, even when those organizational differences lead to persistent differences in performance, and why established firms fail to exploit new opportunities, even when they are publicly observable.

We endogenize separation in a search model of the labor market and allow for bargaining over the continuation of employment relationships following productivity shocks to take place under asymmetric information. In such a setting separation may occur even if continuation of the employment relationship is privately efficient for workers and firms. We show that reductions in the cost of separation, owing for example to a reduction in firing taxes, lead to an increase in job instability and, when separation costs are initially high, may be welfare decreasing for workers and firms. We furthermore show that, in response to an exogenous reduction in firing taxes, workers and firms may switch from rigid to flexible employment contracts, which further amplifies the increase in job instability caused by policy reform.

We explore the optimal delegation of decision rights by a principal to a better informed but biased agent. In an infinitely repeated game a long lived principal faces a series of short lived agents. Every period they play a cheap talk game ala Crawford and Sobel (1982) with constant bias, quadratic loss functions and general distributions of the state of the world. We characterize the optimal delegation schemes for all discount rates and show that they resemble organizational arrangements that are commonly observed, including centralization and threshold delegation. For small biases threshold delegation is optimal for almost all distributions. Outsourcing can only be optimal if the principal is sufficiently impatient.

We analyse a search model of the labour market in which firms and workers meet bilaterally and negotiate over wages in the presence of private information. We show that a fall in labour market frictions induces more aggressive wage bargaining behaviour, which in turn leads to a costly increase in job insecurity. This adverse insecurity effect can be so large that firms and workers who are in an employment relationship can be made worse off by a fall in labour market frictions. In contrast, firms and workers who are not in an employment relationship and are searching the market for a counterpart are always made better off by such a fall in labour market frictions. We then endogenize the organizational structure of the employment relationship and show that a fall in labour market frictions induces a one-off reorganization in which firms and workers switch from a rigid employment relationship to a flexible one. This reorganization leads to a large, one-off increase in job insecurity and unemployment.

We explore the role of human capital investments in the location decisions of firms. We show that whether human capital investments act as a force for or against concentration depends on who is undertaking them and whether they are industry- or firm-specific. We also discuss the empirical predictions of our theoretical analysis.

I develop a property rights theory of the firm in which managers bargain over the sharing of quasi-rents in the presence of private information. I analyse the interdependence between the ownership structure of firms and the bargaining inefficiency that is due to the presence of private information and derive the optimal ownership structure that minimizes the bargaining inefficiency. I first assume that managers can only contract over the ownership structure and show that they optimally choose one that minimizes (maximizes) their aggregate disagreement pay-off if the minimum expected quasi-rents are large (small). I then extend my analysis and allow the managers to contract over the ownership structure and the bargaining game that is played ex-post. I show that the main results continue to hold if and only if ownership structures are deterministic and cannot be made contingent on information that is revealed ex-post.

Foreign direct investment projects can generate spillovers through backward linkages in the host economy. This will be the case if local competitors in the project's own industry can benefit from the upstream efficiency improvements that were induced by the foreign firm. We provide microfoundations for this spillover effect and argue that its creation depends crucially on the supplier arrangement that is chosen by the MNC. We use an incomplete contract framework to study the optimal supplier arrangement. The MNC will produce the inputs itself if the supplier's investment is neither too human capital nor too asset specific. The MNC will use several independent suppliers if its own investment is not too supplier specific, competition between suppliers is neither too strong nor too weak and competition in the project's own industry is not too strong. Finally, the MNC will use only one independent supplier if its own investment is very supplier specific, competition between suppliers is either very strong or very weak and the supplier's investment is either very human capital or asset specific. The foreign investment only generates spillovers to the local industry if the MNC uses several independent suppliers.