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Whether holding resources in excess of what is needed to sustain routine operations (i.e., having slack) increases or decreases firm performance is a question of ongoing interest to management scholars. We contribute to existing theory by arguing that human resource slack generally decreases a firm's performance but that holding excess numbers of employees who possess important tacit knowledge that is specific to firms may benefit the firm. We find that the value of these excess resources increases as firms face competitive pressures and decreases when firms' operational choices facilitate the standardization of workflows. We obtain initial empirical evidence for our predictions by testing them on a novel dataset comprising six years of data for 4,070 manufacturing plants in Mexico.

This paper develops an organizational approach to corporate governance and assesses the effectiveness of corporate governance and implications for policy. Most corporate governance research focuses on a universal link between corporate governance practices (e.g., board structure, shareholder activism) and performance outcomes, but neglects how interdependencies between the organization and diverse environments lead to variations in the effectiveness of different governance practices. In contrast to such closed systems approaches, we propose a framework based on open systems approaches to organizations, which examines these organizational interdependencies in terms of the costs, contingencies, and complementarities of different corporate governance practices. These three sets of organizational factors are useful in analyzing the effectiveness of corporate governance in diverse organizational environments. We also explore the impact of costs, contingencies, and complementarities on the effectiveness of different governance aspects through the use of stylized cases and discuss the implications for different approaches to policy such as soft law or hard law .

An increasing volume of business activity appears to be occurring via alliances or other interfirm arrangements in which complex contracts are featured, yet there has been relatively little study of contract design in the strategy or management literatures. The economics literature on contracting has been extensive, but it has been less concerned with learning and evolution-phenomena in which strategy and organization scholars are deeply interested. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between two types of contractual provisions that are important in high-technology contracts, or contracts for which environmental uncertainty or technological complexity are significant, namely, contingency planning and task description. Previous research suggests that contracts can vary significantly in the degree of detail with which such key provisions are written, and that they are each subject to learning. In this paper, we find evidence from a sample of 386 contracts that contingency planning and task description behave as complements in contractual design. We argue that this complementarity reflects patterns of learning to contract. We also find that repeated exchange between two firms leads to greater effort at contingency planning in subsequent contracts, a finding that is also consistent with learning effects, but not with frequently made claims that contracts and trust are substitutes.

Contingency fee contracts predicate an attorney’s compensation on the outcome of a case. Such contracts are widely accepted when used in civil litigation by private plaintiffs who might not otherwise he able to afford legal representation. However, such arrangements are controversial when government plaintiffs like attorneys general and local governments retain private lawyers to litigate on behalf of the public in return for a percentage of any recovery from the lawsuit Some commentators praise such public client contingency fee contracts, which have become commonplace, as an efficient way to achieve justice. Critics, however, view them as corrupt, undemocratic, and unethical. This Comment contributes to this debate by arguing that public client contingency fee contracts are not only permissible, as some have argued, but that certain legal doctrines obligate government entities to form these contracts. First, this Comment contends that the principle that government litigators have a special duty to “seek justice” obligates government actors to enter into public client contingency fee contracts. The obligation to form such contracts is triggered when civil justice requires enforcement, but constraints prevent government attorneys from pursuing litigation. This contention undermines critics’ claim that the “seek justice” principle means public client contingency fee contracts are impermissible. Second, this Comment argues that the public trust doctrine also obliges government entities to form public client contingency fee contracts in some instances. These arguments undermine attach on public client contingency fee contracts and demonstrate the existence of a heretofore ignored obligation in public civil litigation.

We argue that the importance of self-esteem lies in what people believe they need to be or do to have worth as a person. These contigencies of self-worth are both sources of motivation and areas of psychological vulnerability. In domains of contingent self-worth, people pursue self-esteem by attempting to validate their abilities and qualities. This pursuit of self-esteem, we argue, has costs to learning, relationships, autonomy, self-regulation, and mental and physical health. We suggest alternatives to this costly pursuit of self-esteem.

The rise of contingent employment relations has been one of the most profound shifts in the US economy over the past forty years. While recent scholarship has begun to examine the consequences of organizations' use of contingent workers for the full-time, standard employees in those workplaces, important limitations remain in this line of research. First, much of the research in this area relies on small, nonrandom samples of organizations and data that are decades old. Second, limited attention has been paid to the mechanisms through which the use of contingent workers shapes standard employees' attitudes and outcomes. Finally, the varied consequences of using different types of contingent workers have been underdeveloped in the literature. In this article, we address these limitations of existing research, contributing insights about the differential consequences of how organizations obtain flexibility as well as the nature of job insecurity in the \"new economy.\"

Since 1957, New York courts have required contingent fee lawyers to file \"closing statements\" that disclose settlement amounts, lawyers' fees, an accounting of expenses, and other information. This Article provides a preliminary analysis of these data for the period 2004-2013. Among this Article's findings are that settlement rates in New York state courts are very high (84%) relative to previous studies; that very few cases are resolved by dispositive motions; that litigated cases and settled cases have almost exactly the same average recovery; that median litigation expenses, other than attorney's fees, are 3% of gross recovery; that claims are disproportionately from poor neighborhoods; and that attorneys' fees are almost always one-third of net recovery, which is the maximum allowed by law.

Class action lawyers are some of the most frequently derided players in the system of civil litigation. The focus of this ire is usually the \"take\" that class action lawyers receive from class action settlements. It is often asserted that class action lawyers take too much from settlements and leave too little for class members, that class actions are little more than a device for the lawyers to enrich themselves at the expense of the class. These criticisms have inspired countless calls for reform of class action litigation and indeed, some of these calls have found their way into legislation. Here, Fitzpatrick argues that much of this criticism of class action lawyers is misguided. In many cases, class action lawyers not only do not make too much, but actually make too little. Indeed, he argues that in perhaps the most common class action--the so-called \"small stakes\" class action--it is hard to see, as a theoretical matter, why the lawyers should not receive everything and leave nothing for class members at all.

Several critiques have been leveled at the American Rule—that is, the rule that each party to a lawsuit should pay for its attorneys. Some claim that there were no principled justifications offered by the nineteenth-century jurists who authored the opinions marking the rule's origins. Instead, these jurists only cited their states' \"taxable costs\" statutes. Others claim that the American Rule—as well as its close relative, the contingency-fee contract—contributed to a \"liability explosion\" in that century. This Article offers a comprehensive examination of the origins of, rationales given for, and impact of the American Rule; then it evaluates instances in which the rule has faced legislative, judicial, and academic opposition.

The alienability of legal claims holds the promise of increasing access to justice and fostering development of law. I develop a principal-agent framework where litigation funders provide expertise in reducing uncertainty in agents' disutility of production. The model leads to the counterintuitive prediction that litigation funders prefer cases with novel issues, and social surplus is positively correlated with legal uncertainty. Consistent with the model, court backlog, court expenditures, and a slowing in average time to completion are associated with third-party funding; cases with third-party funding receive more citations and are reversed less often than comparable cases without such arrangements.