We revisit Western Europe's record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and greater...

Dynastic management is the inter-generational transmission of control over assets that is typical of family-owned firms. It is pervasive around the World, but especially in developing countries. We argue that dynastic management is a potential source of inefficiency: if the heir to the family...

This Paper studies the identification problem in infinite horizon Markovian games and proposes a generally applicable estimation method. Every period firms simultaneously select an action from a finite set. We characterize the set of Markov equilibria. Period profits are a linear function of...

In an environment in which both buyers and sellers can undertake match specific investments, the presence of market competition for matches may solve hold-up and coordination problems generated by the absence of complete contingent contracts. In particular, this Paper shows that when matching is...

We document the establishment and evolution of a cooperative norm among workers using evidence from a natural field experiment on a leading UK farm. Workers are paid according to a relative incentive scheme under which increasing individual effort raises a worker's own pay but imposes a negative...

Support for many R&D and technology policies relies on empirical evidence that R&D ‘spills over’ between firms. But there are two countervailing R&D spillovers: positive effects from technology spillovers and negative effects from business stealing by product market rivals. We develop a...

This paper develops a framework for evaluating the social returns to infrastructure investments that intensify product market competition. We use a circular model with asymmetric production costs both for incumbent firms and potential entrants, where unit transport cost measures the intensity of...

We document the establishment and evolution of a cooperative norm among workers using evidence from a natural field experiment on a leading UK farm. Workers are paid according to a relative incentive scheme under which increasing individual effort raises a worker's own pay but imposes a negative...

This paper analyzes optimal unemployment insurance over the business cycle in a search model in which unemployment stems from matching frictions (in booms) and job rationing (in recessions). Job rationing during recessions introduces two novel effects ignored in previous studies of optimal...

Organizations are increasingly sourcing their business processes through external service providers, a practice known as Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). Worldwide, the current BPO market could be as much as 279 billion and is predicted to continue growing at 25% annually. Academic...