Product availability impacts many industries such as transportation, events, and retail, yet little empirical evidence documents the importance of stocking decisions for firm profits, vertical relationships, or consumers. We conduct several experiments, exogenously removing top-selling products...

We provide a general framework for the study of cascade effects created by interconnections between sectors, firms or financial institutions. Focusing on a multi sector economy linked through a supply network, we show how structural properties of the supply network determine both whether...

We organized business associations for the owner-managers of randomly selected young Chinese firms to study the effect of business networks on firm performance. We randomized 2,800 firms into small groups whose managers held monthly meetings for one year, and into a "no- meetings" control group....

Within the last five years, Canada, Sweden and New Zealand have joined the ranks of the United Kingdom and other countries in issuing government bonds that are indexed to inflation. Some observers of the experience in these countries have argued that the United States should follow suit. This...

Discussions of school accountability focus on two issues: poor test administration and the expense of accountability. Up to this point, researchers have focused on test quality and simply assumed that the programs are expensive enough to crowd out other policies, such as class size reduction or...

This paper investigates whether managers who fail to exploit regulatory loopholes are vulnerable to replacement. We use the U.S. hospital industry in 1985-1996 as a case study. A 1988 change in Medicare rules widened a pre-existing loophole in the Medicare payment system, presenting hospitals...

Ethnic Chinese networks, as proxied by the product of ethnic Chinese population shares, are found in 1980 and 1990 to have increased bilateral trade both within Southeast Asia and for other country pairs. Their effects within Southeast Asia are much greater for differentiated than for...

This paper studies asymmetry in economic activity over the business cycle. It develops a tractable multisector model of the economy in which complementarity across inputs causes aggregate activity to be left skewed with countercyclical volatility. We then examine implications of the model...

Entrepreneurs, particularly in the developing world, often hire from their networks: friends, family, and resulting referrals. Network hiring has two benefits, documented extensively in the empirical literature: entrepreneurs know more about the ability of their network (and indeed they are...