This work studies the organization of less-than-truckload trucking from a contractual point of view. We show that the huge number of owner-operators working in the industry hides a much less fragmented reality. Most of those owner-operators are “quasi-integrated” in higher organizational...

We explain why European trucking carriers are much smaller and rely more heavily on owner-operators (as opposed to employee drivers) than their US counterparts. Our analysis begins by ruling out differences in technology as the source of those disparities and confirms that standard hypotheses in...

The public transportation is gaining importance every year basically due the population growth, environmental policies and, route and street congestion. Too able an efficient management of all the resources related to public transportation, several techniques from different areas are being...

Firms compete by choosing both a price and a design from a family of designs that can be represented as demand rotations. Consumers engage in costly sequential search among firms. Each time a consumer pays a search cost he observes a new offering. An offering consists of a price quote and a new...

We present a model of timing of seasonal sales where stores choose several designs at the beginning of the season without knowing wich one, if any, will be fashionable. Fashionable designs have a chance to fetch high prices in fashion markets while non-fashionable ones must be sold in a discount...

I study a repeated buyer-seller relationship for the exchange of a given good. Asymmetric information over the buyer's reservation price, which is subject to random shocks, may lead the seller to use a rigid pricing policy despite the possibility of making higher profits through price...

Excess entry refers to the high failure rate of new entrepreneurial ventures. Economic explanations suggest 'hit and run' entrants and risk-seeking behavior. A psychological explanation is that people (entrepreneurs) are overconfident in their abilities (Camerer & Lovallo, 1999). Characterizing...

In analyzing firm entry and exit across Belgian manufacturing industries, this paper presents evidence that import competition and foreign direct investment discourage entry and stimulate exit of domestic entrepreneurs. These results are in line with theoretical occupational choice models that...

In analyzing the distinctive contribution of foreign subsidiaries and domestic firms to productivity growth in aggregate Belgian manufacturing, this paper shows that foreign ownership is an important source of firm heterogeneity affecting productivity dynamics. Foreign firms have contributed...