IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/indcch/v13y2004i6p867-882.html

Determinants of organizational form: transaction costs and institutions in the European trucking industry

Author

Listed:
  • Benito Arruñada
  • Manuel González-Díaz
  • Alberto Fernández

Abstract

We explain why European trucking carriers are much smaller and rely more heavily on owner-operators (as opposed to employee drivers) than their US counterparts. Our analysis begins by ruling out differences in technology as the source of those disparities and confirms that standard hypotheses in organizational economics, which have been shown to explain the choice of organizational form in US industry, also apply in Europe. We then argue that the preference for subcontracting over vertical integration in Europe is the result of European institutions--particularly, labor regulation and tax laws--that increase the costs of vertical integration. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Benito Arruñada & Manuel González-Díaz & Alberto Fernández, 2004. "Determinants of organizational form: transaction costs and institutions in the European trucking industry," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 13(6), pages 867-882, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:indcch:v:13:y:2004:i:6:p:867-882
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Benito Arruñada & Luis Vázquez & Giorgio Zanarone, 2009. "Institutional constraints on organizations: the case of Spanish car dealerships," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 30(1), pages 15-26.
    2. Marianne Fischman & Emeric Lendjel, 2010. "Comment expliquer la permanence de l'artisanat dans le transport fluvial de marchandises ?," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-00582556, HAL.
    3. Josef Windsperger & Maria Jell, 2005. "Structuring residual income and decision rights under internal governance: results from the Hungarian trucking industry," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 26(5), pages 295-305.
    4. Marta Fernández-Olmos & Jorge Rosell-Martínez & Manuel A. Espitia-Escuer, 2009. "Vertical integration in the wine industry: a transaction costs analysis on the Rioja DOCa," Agribusiness, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(2), pages 231-250.
    5. Agrell, Per J. & Lundin, Johan & Norrman, Andreas, 2017. "Supply Chain Management: Horizontal carrier coordination through cooperative governance structures," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 194(C), pages 59-72.
    6. Francine Lafontaine & Laura Malaguzzi Valeri, 2009. "The deregulation of international trucking in the European Union: form and effect," Journal of Regulatory Economics, Springer, vol. 35(1), pages 19-44, February.
    7. Hu, Y. & Huang, Z. & Hendrikse, G.W.J. & Xu, X., 2005. "Organization and Strategy of Farmer Specialized Cooperatives in China," ERIM Report Series Research in Management ERS-2005-059-ORG, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
    8. Marianne Fischman & Emeric Lendjel, 2010. "Comment expliquer la permanence de l'artisanat dans le transport fluvial de marchandises ?," Post-Print halshs-00582556, HAL.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
    • L14 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Transactional Relationships; Contracts and Reputation
    • L22 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Organization and Market Structure
    • L92 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Railroads and Other Surface Transportation

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:indcch:v:13:y:2004:i:6:p:867-882. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/icc .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.