Self-Employment Within the Firm

SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

Economic Development According to Chandler

National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-11-01 · 1 citations

Chandler (1977) shows that large firms require hierarchies of white-collar workers to coordinate complex production.We document that this insight continues to hold globally today, and we show that low education levels in developing countries limit the supply of white-collar workers and constrain firm size.We extend the occupational choice model of Lucas (1978) to allow entrepreneurs to reorganize their firms by allocating administrative tasks to hired professionals, which brings the firm closer to constant returns to scale.We calibrate the model to be consistent with cross-sectional microdata and validate it using quasi-experimental and experimental evidence on the effects of educational expansions and management training interventions.Skills explain twothirds of the reorganization of production into large firms with economic development, while structural transformation and reductions in barriers are needed to explain the remaining shift.

Economic Development According to Chandler

SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

Workers' Exposure to Air Pollution in Urban Uganda

AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-08-13

Workers' Exposure to Air Pollution in Urban Uganda

AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-08-13

Self-Employment Within the Firm

National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-09-01 · 5 citations

We collect time-use data for entrepreneurs and their workers in over 1,000 manufacturing firms in urban Uganda.We document limited labor specialization within the firm for establishments of all sizes and argue that this is likely due to the prevalence of product customization.We then develop a general equilibrium model of task assignment within the firm, estimate it with our data, and find large barriers to labor specialization.This setting is close, in terms of aggregate productivity and firm scale, to an extreme benchmark in which each firm is just a collection of self-employed individuals sharing a production space.Given how firms are organized internally, the benefits from alleviating other frictions that constrain firm growth are muted: most African firms resemble artisanal workshops whose business model is not easily scalable.

Self-Employment within the Firm

SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

Self-employment within the Firm

SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

Measuring Valuation of Liquidity with Penalized Withdrawals

SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

Labor Misallocation Across Firms and Regions

National Bureau of Economic Research · 2022-07-01 · 15 citations

We develop a frictional labor market model with multiple regions and heterogeneous firms to study how frictions impeding labor mobility across space affect the joint allocation of labor across firms and regions. Bringing the model to matched employer-employee data from Germany, we find that spatial frictions generate large misallocation of labor across firms within regions. By shielding firms from competition for workers from other regions, spatial frictions allow low productivity firms to expand, reducing aggregate productivity. Overall, we show that taking into account the characteristics of the local labor market is important to quantify the aggregate losses from spatial frictions.