What insights can be gained from bringing the theory of the firm to the global economy? I discuss several new features of the world economy that can be explained by incorporating the theory of the firm into the theory of international trade. Among the new features I discuss are the move to...

Financial constraints are an important impediment to the growth of small businesses. We study theoretically and empirically how the financial constraints of agents affect their decisions to exert effort, and, hence the organizational decisions and growth of principals, in the context of...

In this paper we develop a theory of patenting in which a firm preserves its reputation to only apply for a patent whenever a truly patentable idea has been generated. Firms have a short-run incentive to deviate and receive additional rents from unworthy pending patents, as well as potential...

We investigate private and social incentives for standardization to ensure market-wide system compatibility in a two-dimensional spatial competition model. We develop a new methodology to analyze competition on a torus and show that there is a fundamental conflict of interest between consumers...

The paper develops a simple theoretical model of inventory control in global supply chains. It identifies a role for intermediaries in managing inventory, and shows that inserting an intermediary as an additional link in a supply chain is profitable when demand volatility is high. It also...

This study investigates whether excess effort to climb a career ladder justifies policy interventions. The answer depends on whether the government is able to levy a higher tax burden on career workers than on non-career workers. Both a tax on top income aimed at lowering the rewards of...

Can formal contracts help resolving the holdup problem? We address this important question by studying the holdup problem in repeated transactions between a seller and a buyer in which the seller can make relation-specific investments in each period. In contrast to previous findings, we...

The paper undertakes a cross-sectoral analysis of a salient empirical implication of the model of tacit collusion advanced by Abreu et al (1986). Specifically, the prevalence of a first order Markovian process for alternating between price wars and collusive periods is assessed by means of...

We analyze the optimal ownership, delegation and compensation structures when a manager is hired to run a firm and to gather information on investment projects. The initial owner has two tasks: monitoring the manager and supervising project choice. Optimality would require a large ownership...

In this paper we estimate a dominant firm-competitive fringe model for the crude oil market using quarterly data on oil prices for the 1986-2009 period. All the estimated structural parameters have the expected sign and are significant at standard test levels. We find that OPEC exercised its...