Firms’ Boundaries and the Division of Labor: Empirical Strategies
讨论如何从新兴的企业边界理论中生成和检验实证命题，提出利用专业化回报的变化来检验劳动分工对企业边界的影响，并以美国律师事务所为例说明市场规模的运用。
A large theoretical literature focuses on the question: What determines firms' boundaries? Recently, Garicano and Santos and Holmstrom and Milgrom have proposed theories in which firms' boundaries reflect the division of labor across individuals. This paper discusses strategies for generating and testing empirical propositions from this emerging class of theories. We propose that variation in the returns to specialization is extremely useful to test and quantify the effect of the division of labor on firms' boundaries. We discuss the use of two shifters to the returns to specialization, and relate how we exploit one of these, market size, in preliminary work on the determinants of law firms' boundaries in the United States