Topics in Organizational Economics

This course introduces the students to the field of Organizational Economics. We study the nature, design, and performance of organizations. Organizations, such as firms, bureaucracies, and political parties, live in a second-best world, where inefficiencies are inevitable. Our goal is to understand and measure these inefficiencies, study their causes and how to minimize them. We focus on the empirical literature that brings the workhorse models of organizational economics to the data. We emphasize different research designs used to study organizations, as a way of delving into a broad range of empirical methods used in the literature. This course is divided into two parts of equal length. We first study the literature of organizational economics within the public sector and NGOs (Otero). The second part introduces the broader literature within private sector organizations (Boudreau). By design, the course is intended for a broad set of students. Many of the tools and skills that are developed in this course will be useful not only within organizational economics but, more broadly, to other fields such as industrial organization, political economy, development economics. Our ultimate goal is to accelerate the students' transition toward conducting their own independent research.