Ghanaian manufacturing firms face a highly risky environment. Firms may attempt to manage these risks by undertaking production, input, and investment strategies designed to lower profit variability. Mean-variance analysis implies, however, that these strategies involve a trade-off with lower...

This chapter reviews the literature on the theory of relational incentive contracts.  It motivates the discussion by the classic applications of relational contracts to the GM-Fisher Body relationship and the relationships between Japanese automobile manufacturers and their subcontractors.  It...

We consider an observer who makes a finite number of observations of an industry producing a homogeneous good, where each observation consists of the market price and firm specific production quantities.  We develop a revealed preference test (in the form of a linear program) for the hypothesis...

This paper surveys the most popular parametric and semi-parametric estimators for Cobb-Douglas production functions arising from the econometric literature of the past two decades. We focus on the different approaches dealing with 'transmission bias' in firm-level studies, which arises from...

These are additional notes relating to the paper `The Comparative Statics of Constrained Optimization Problems`, which is appearing in Econometrica. It gathers together material present in various earlier versions of the paper, as well as some new material, which are not found in the published...

We identify a natural way of ordering functions, which we call the interval dominance order and develop a theory of monotone comparative statistics based on this order.  This way of ordering functions is weaker than the standard one based on the single crossing property (Milgrom and Shannon,...

This paper presents a model of a rational seller who is actively learning the slope of his demand curve via his pricing strategy.  Consequently, this seller optimally experiments with his price.  Resulting price patterns show a lot of discreteness (as observed in the data), which has proved to...

We present a continous time non tatonnement process for frictionless and perfectly competitive markets with (possibly non convex) production, where the natural rate of unemployment (NRU) emerges as the asymptotic value of unemployment.  Consumers and producers are myopic and repeatedly...

Suppose we observe a finite number of input decisions made by a firm, as well as the prices at which those inputs were acquired.  What conditions on the set of observations are necessary and sufficient for it to be consistent with a firm choosing inputs to maximize profit, subject to a...

We propose a framework for analyzing transformations of demand. Such transformations frequently stem from changes in the dispersion of consumers` valuations, which lead to rotations of the demand curve. In a wide variety of settings, profits are a U-shaped function of dispersion. A high level of...