Research Publications

1. Organization, inequality and productivity in a knowledge economy

My main area of research starting from studies how economic organziation deals with individuals with limited ability to acquire knowledge. My JPE (2000) paper develops the main framework, which shows how a pure information problem --solving problems -- can be transformed into an organizational problem and generates a pretty reocnogizable feature: management by excepcion, where those above complement the knowledge of those below on the problems they cannot dal with. I develop line of work, my main conribution, in work with Esteban Rossi-Hansberg and Pol Antràs, with Thomas Hubbard (all the empirical work on lawyers), with Jacques Cremer and Andrea Prat and with Willie Fuchs and Luis Rayo. Very closely related work theoretical and empirical also with Tano Santos, Wouter Dessein, and empirical with Benito Arruñada, Luis Vázquez and Steven Kaplan. Two of the papers below (the ones with Palacios-Huerta) don't have cognitive costs but they do have an organizational/incentive problem--in soccer!

Hierarchies and the Organization of Knowledge in Production

Luis Garicano

Journal of Political Economy vol 108: 5, October 2000

Contractual Allocation of Decision Rights and Incentives: The Case of Automobile Distribution

Benito Arruñada, Luis Garicano and Luis Vázquez

Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 17: 257-284, April 2001

The Effect of Business-to-Business E-commerce on Transactions Costs

Luis Garicano and Steven N. Kaplan

Journal of Industrial Economics, v. XLIX, no. 4: 463-487, 2001.

Business-to-Business E-commerce: Value Creation, Value Capture and Valuation

Luis Garicano and Steven N. Kaplan

Advances in Applied Microeconomics, Vol. 11: Elsevier, 2002.

Firms' Boundaries and the Division of Labor: Empirical Strategies

Luis Garicano and Thomas N. Hubbard

Journal of the European Economic Association (Papers and Proceedings), vol 1: 2, April-May 2003.

Inequality and the Organization of Knowledge

Luis Garicano and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, 94:2, pp. 197-202, May 2004.

Referrals

Luis Garicano and Tano Santos

American Economic Review, 94: 3, pp. 499 - 525, June 2004.

Favoritism under Social Pressure

Luis Garicano, Natxo Palacios and Canice Prendergast.

Review of Economics and Statistics, 87: 2, pp. 208-216, May 2005.

Hierarchical Sorting and Learning Costs

Luis Garicano and Thomas N. Hubbard

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 58:2, pp. 349-369, August 2005.

Intelligence Failures: An Organizational Economics Perspective

Luis Garicano and Richard Posner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19:4, pp. 151-179, Fall 2005

Offshoring in a Knowledge Economy

Pol Antras, Luis Garicano and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2006.

The Knowledge Economy at the turn of the Twentieth Century: the Emergence of Hierarchies

Luis Garicano and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

Journal of the European Economic Association (Papers and Proceedings), vol 4, April-May 2006.

Organization and Inequality in a Knowledge Economy

Luis Garicano and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2006.

Managerial Leverage is Limited by the Extent of the Market: Hierarchies, Specialization and the Utilization of Lawyers’ Human Capital

Luis Garicano and Thomas N. Hubbard

Journal of Law and Economics, 2007, 50(1), pp. 1 - 43.

Language and the Theory of the Firm

Jacques Crémer, Luis Garicano and Andrea Prat

February 2007, Quarterly Journal of Economics

Organizing Offshoring: Middle Managers and Communication Costs

Pol Antras, Luis Garicano and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg In Helpman, E., Marin D., Verdier T. (2008) (Eds),

The Organization of Firms in the Global Economy, Harvard University Press.

Specialization, Firms and Markets: The division of labor within and between law firms

Luis Garicano and Thomas N. Hubbard

Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, October 2009.

Information Technology, Organization, and Productivity in the Public Sector: Evidence from Police Departments

Luis Garicano and Paul Heaton

Journal of Labor Economics, January 2010

Offshoring and Wage Inequality: Using Occupational Licensing as a Shifter of Offshoring Costs

Chiara Criscuolo and Luis Garicano

American Economic Review, Papers and Proceeding, May 2010

Matching Problems with Expertise in Firms and Markets

William Fuchs and Luis Garicano

Journal of the European Economic Association, March 2010

Organizing for Synergies

Wouter Dessein, Luis Garicano and Robert Gertner

American Economic Journal-Micro, November 2010, 2(4): 77–114a

Learning about the nature of production from equilibrium assignment patterns (WP version)

Luis Garicano and Thomas N. Hubbard

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Volume 84, Issue 1, September 2012, Pages 136–153.

Knowledge Organization and Communication

Luis Garicano and Yanhui Wu

Organization Science, September-October 2012.

Organizing Growth

Luis Garicano and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

Journal of Economic Theory 2012, 147:2, 626- 656

Organizational Economic with Cognitive Costs (2011 WP version)

Luis Garicano and Andrea Prat

Advances in Economic Theory, Econometric Society 10th World Congress, D. Acemoglu, M. Arellano, E. Dekkel, Cambridge University Press, June 2013

Hierarchies and the Division of Labor (WP version, pre extensive copy editing)

Luis Garicano and Tim Van Zandt

Handbook of Organizational Economics, Robert Gibbons and John Roberts, Editors, Princeton University Press, 2013

Sabotage in Tournaments: Making the Beautiful Game a bit Less Beautiful (WP Version)

Luis Garicano and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta

In: Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, "Beautiful Game Theory How Soccer Can Help Economics", Princeton University Press, 2014.

The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization

Nick Bloom, Luis Garicano, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

Management Science 2014, 60(12): 2859-2885, December 2014

Knowledge-Based Hierarchies: Using Organizations to Understand the Economy (Note: this is a review of my main line of work with Esteban Rossi-Hansberg and other coauthors written for a general audience)

Luis Garicano and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

Annual Review of Economics Vol 7, 1-30, 2015.

Optimal Contracting and the Organization of Knowledge

Willie Fuchs, Luis Garicano and Luis Rayo

Review of Economic Studies, 82 (2), 632 - 658, Spring 2015.

Why Organizations Fail: Models and Cases (Note: this survey paper reviews the literature on Organiational Economics and applies it to understand some recent, large scale, business failure cases)

Luis Garicano and Luis Rayo

Journal of Economic Literature 54(1), 137–192, March 2016.

The Returns to Knowledge Hierarchies

Luis Garicano and Tom Hubbard

Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, Vol 32(4): 653-684, November 2016

Firm Size Distortions and the Productivity Distribution: Evidence from France

Luis Garicano, Claire Lelarge and John van Reenen

American Economic Review 106(11): 3439-79, November 2016.

Relational Knowledge Transfers

Luis Garicano and Luis Rayo

American Economic Review 107 (9):2695-2730, September 2017.

Earnings inequality and coordination costs: Evidence from US Law firms

Luis Garicano and Thomas Hubbard

Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, 34 (2): 196-229, May 2018.

2. On European monetary, fiscal and financial policy

Since the financial crisis, I have written and thought a lot about European integration- what worked, what did not. This was never my main area of research, but it was, almost always, one of my two main areas of policy writing (the other being Spain). You can see those parts in the OpEds tab and in the Policy Proposals tab. As for research, you can find here papers on the governance of the Spanish Cajas, before their failure, anticipating what did happen; on the Political Economy of the pre-Eurozone credit cycle; on a solution to create European safe assets through securitization of Sovereign debt; on how to identify the impact of the sovereign crisis related credit constraints on the composition of investments and on the economic consequences of the war in Ukraine. Finally, next Spring a lot of this work will culminate in a forthcoming Princeton University Press book with John Cochrane and Klaus Masuch on how the successful responses by the ECB to successive crises have led it to a position where it provides terrible incentives to governments, financial actors and European institutions.

Did Good Cajas Extend Bad Loans? Governance, Human Capital and Loan Portfolios

Vicente Cuñat, and Luis Garicano

FEDEA Monograph, "The Crisis of the Spanish Economy, 2009.

Towards a New Architecture for Financial Supervision: Seven Principles

Luis Garicano and Rosa Lastra

Journal of International Economic Law, vol 13:3, pp 597-621.

Political Credit Cycles: the Case of the Eurozone (WP version))

Jesús Fernández Villaverde, Luis Garicano and Tano Santos

Journal of Economc Perspectives, 27(3): 145-66. Summer 2013.

The Sovereign-Bank Diabolic Loop and ESBies

Markus K. Brunnermeier, Luis Garicano, Stijn Van Nieuwerberg, Philip Lane, Marco Pagano, Tano Santos, Ricardo Reis, David Thesmar and Dimitri Vayanos

American Economic Review P&P, 508-512, May 2016.