What type of businesses do unions target for organizing? A dynamic model of the union organizing process is constructed to answer this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity and decides which ones to organize and when. An establishment becomes...

In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...

Previous research shows that firms shroud high add-on prices in competitive markets with naive consumers leading to inefficiency. We analyze the effects of regulatory intervention via educating naive consumers on equilibrium prices and welfare. Our model allows firms to shroud, unshroud, or...

This paper takes a retrospective look at the U.S. government's effort to rescue and restructure General Motors and Chrysler in the midst of the 2009 economic and financial crisis. The paper describes how two of the largest industrial companies in the world came to seek a bailout from the U.S....

Information and communication technology plays an important role in achieving a higher level of energy efficiency. In particular, energy efficiency can be achieved by integrating information technology into electricity networks to enable the interaction between suppliers and customers (smart...

The increasing use of demand-side management as a tool to reliably meet electricity demand at peak time has stimulated interest among researchers, consumers and producer organizations, managers, regulators and policymakers, This research reviews the growing literature on models used to study...

Despite being a fixture of everyday life in the Arab world, wasta, which may be thought of as special influence by members of the same group or tribe, has received little attention from social scientists. Our casual empiricism suggests that wasta is an important determinant of how economic...

This paper examines the change in operating and financial performance of Swedish firms that were either partly or fully privatized during the period of 1989-2007. Two different methods are used to empirically investigate the performance of privatized firms. First, accounting data prior to and...

In this paper we provide an analysis of the process of creative destruction across 24 countries and 2-digit industries over the past decade. We rely on a newly assembled dataset that draws from different micro data sources (business registers, census, or representative enterprise surveys). The...

Productivity dispersion across firms is large and persistent, and worker reallocation among firms is an important source of productivity growth. The purpose of the paper is to estimate the structure of an equilibrium model of growth through innovation that explains these facts. The model is a...