The organization of firms across countries

Helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper have come from detailed discussions with Abhijit Banerjee, Bob Gibbons, Avner Greif, Oliver Hart, Bengt Holmstrom, Andrei Shleifer, Julie Wulf, Luigi Zingales and participants at seminars in Duke, the Hague, Harvard, HBS, LBS, Mannheim, MIT, Stanford, Tokyo, UC Merced, USC, Warwick and Wharton. We would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council, the Anglo-German Foundation, the Advanced Institute for Management and the Kauffman Foundation for their substantial financial support. We received no funding from the global management consultancy firm we worked with in developing the survey tool. Our partnership with Pedro Castro, Stephen Dorgan and John Dowdy has been particularly important in the development of the project. We are very grateful for the endorsement letters from the Banque de France, Bank of Greece, Bank of Japan, Bank of Portugal, Bundesbank, Confederation of Indian Industry, European Central Bank, European Union, Greek Employers Federation, IUI Sweden, Ministero delle Finanze, National Bank of Poland, Peking University, Peoples Bank of China, Polish Treasury, Reserve Bank of India, Shenzhen Development Bank, Sveriges Riksbank, U.K. Treasury and the Warsaw Stock Exchange. 'This paper is part of the SCIFI-GLOW Collaborative Project supported by the European Commission's Seventh Research Framework Programme, Contract number SSH7-CT-2008-217436.' The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• December 5, 2011