The Flattening Firm: Evidence from Panel Data on the Changing Nature of Corporate Hierarchies

We are grateful to Katie Donohue at Hewitt Associates, K. Subramanium, and Talha Noor Muhammed for assistance in data collection. We would like to thank seminar participants at Wharton, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, the NBER Organizational Economics Conference, and the Harvard Business School Strategy Conference and especially George Baker, Peter Cappelli, Brian Hall, Brigitte Madrian, Kevin Murphy, and Joel Podolny. Wulf acknowledges research support from the Reginald H. Jones Center for Management Policy, Strategy and Organization at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Rajan thanks the Center for Research on Securities Prices, the Center for the Study of the State and the Economy as well as the National Science Foundation for research support. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• April 16, 2003