In the early 1980s he was faculty member of the Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Michigan.
In 1986 he was appointed Associate Professor of Policy and Environment at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Under the assumptions of the model, there exist three regions in which firms, markets, and sequences of bilateral contracts are weakly more efficient than all other mechanisms in a big class.
Echoing the management literature, the firm grows as long as it can use specialized employees to perform the new tasks.
Some economists whose work has been directly influenced by Wernerfelt include Jay Barney, Gerry George, Shelby D. Hunt, Harbir Singh, David Teece and many others.