Many firms provide training to newly recruited employees in order to improve their productivity. This occurs in spite of the fact that the skills acquired by the workers are valuable in competing establishments, which may make offers to those workers and bid them away. Recent research suggests...

Specialist merchants and traders---agents who mediate the transfer of goods and services between producers and consumers---are central to the economic process, but there are few theoretical models in which the institution of intermediation is an endogenous part of an equilibrium. This paper...