In a typical corporate hierarchy, the manager is delegated the authority to make decisions that set directions for the organization, employ subordinates and contract with external suppliers. This paper explains when such delegation of authority can be optimal, using a model of a firm with three...

Economies respond differently to aggregate shocks that reduce output. While some countries rapidly recover their pre-crisis trend, others stagnate. Recent studies provide empirical support for a connection between aggregate growth and plant dynamics through their effect on productivity: the...

Abstract In many areas of economic analysis, economic theory restricts the shape as well as other characteristics of functions used to represent economic constructs. Obvious examples are the monotonicity and curvature conditions that apply to utility, profit, and cost functions. Commonly, these...

This paper examines whether importing intermediate goods improves plant performance. While addressing the issue of simultaneity of a productivity shock and decisions to import intermediates, we estimate the impact of the use of foreign intermediates on plants' productivity using plant-level...

This paper estimates a dynamic model of price discrimination and inventory investment under incomplete information. The model is motivated from an empirical analysis of operations of daily observations on inventories, sales, and purchases of over 2,300 individual products by a U.S. steel...

Certain problems in comparative statics, including (but not exclusively) certain problems in consumer theory, cannot be easily addressed by the methods of lattice programming. One reason for this is that there is no order on the choice space which orders choices in a way which conforms with the...

This paper analyzes a mechanism through which product market competition affects allocation of the managerial efforts. There are two types of firms, incumbents and entrants. Each incumbent firm delegates its control to a manager and cannot observe the manager's effort. The managers of incumbent...

Unexpected variation in emissions can have an enormous impact on the prices of emission permits and the efficiency achieved in tradable permit markets. Shocks to emission levels can be correlated across firms; for example, most firms require more emission permits than planned for following a...

We give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of symmetric equilibrium without ties in common values auctions, with multidimensional independent types and no monotonic assumptions. When the conditions are not satisfied, we are still able to prove the existence of pure strategy...