Congress enacted The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 over the protests of small business advocates who claimed that the ADA would trigger a wave of bankruptcies. Although the profitability of firms may suffer from the costs of ADA compliance, no systematic evidence is available on the...

This paper studies the probability of survival of the manufacturing plants that start producing in Chile in the period 1979-1999 using a proportional hazards model. Opposing previous empirical international evidence, the survival diminishes with age, initial size, and with the rate of growth of...

This paper is concerned with the general question of the provision of information by financial intermediaries to their customers. Specifically, it analyzes the different ways the market can be organized and its effects on pricing and the level of information investors obtain. We find that market...

This paper develops a monopolistic competition model to study the characteristics of products, such as quality improvement and product diversity (function-specialization and individualization), and the division of labor in production. Different from the ordinary economic model, our utility...

This paper studies imperfect price competition between two intermediaries in an electronic business-to-business matching market with indirect network externalities. The intermediaries differ with regard to their ownership structure: an independent third party incumbent marketplace competes with...

Pharmaceutical price control has achieved attentions of policy makers in the world. Japanese pharmaceutical market provides a good case study for price control. First, the Japanese pharmaceutical market has been tightly regulated by price control. Second, the difference between the official...

This paper shows that, unlike what has been found in other papers, a hydro reservoir is an effective tool to exercise market power. Its appealing as a tool is enhanced by the fact that there is no need to constrain total hydro production - a practice too easy to detect -; it suffices to distort...

Abstract: We examine the effects of a government’s sensitivity to its tax revenues, earned from the software industry, on its anti-piracy policies that consists of monitoring and penalizing a commercial software pirate. We consider a strategic entry-deterrence framework where the original...

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...

It is widely speculated that the adoption of a technology takes off to be self-sustaining if it reaches the critical mass. However, the sponsors of competing technologies may engage in strategic maneuvering in the adoption process. Indeed, this paper shows that in the de facto standardization...