This paper provides a theoretical framework to analyze workers' incentives under different ownership. It shows that the workers' effort and expected income are higher and the monitoring intensity is lower in the employee-owned firm than in the capitalist firm. Unlike in previous models, the...

Corruption and imperfect contract enforcement dramatically reduce trade. This paper estimates the reduction, using a structural model of import demand in which transactions costs impose a price markup on traded goods. We find that inadequate institutions constrain trade far more than tariffs do....

This paper studies the effects of international openness and contracting institutions on vertical integration. It first derives a number of predictions regarding the interactions between trade barriers, contracting costs, technology intensity, and the extent of vertical integration from a simple...

This paper analyzes a model with many homogeneous agents, whose effort can be allocated to two tasks. One task produces a public good that is an important input for the production of the final output. The other task only affects the agent's own output. We show that, when the public input and the...

The rationale for issuing poison pill securities remains unclear, despite the findings of a large body of prior research that these defenses adversely affect shareholder wealth. This paper investigates the hypothesis that the adoption of such defenses may reflect shareholders' desire to contract...

Insecurity impedes trade. Using a variant of the gravity model (the workhorse of empirical international economics) Anderson and Marcouiller (1999) showed that transparent government policies and enforceable commercial contracts significantly reduce trade costs and increase trade volume. This...

This paper provides a direct test of how fixed export costs and productivity jointly determine firm-level export behavior. Using Chilean data, we construct indices of fixed export costs for each industry-region-year triplet and match them to domestic firms. Our empirical results show that firms...

This paper provides striking confirmation of the restrictions of the structural gravity model of trade. Structural forces predicted by theory explain 95% of the variation of the fixed effects used to control for them in the recent gravity literature, fixed effects that in principle could reflect...

All countries would agree to immediate global free trade if countries were compensated for any terms-of-trade losses with transfers from countries whose terms-of-trade improve, and if customs unions were required to have no effects on non-member countries. Global free trade with transfers is in...