I find that firms with more than 50 percent of foreign ownership introduce on average more than twice as many more new varieties of goods as private domestic firms. Advantages in productivity account for 32 to 62 percent of the difference in the number and sales of new varieties, while...

This paper shows that how firms export (directly or indirectly via intermediaries) matters. We develop and estimate a dynamic discrete choice model that allows learning-by-exporting on the cost and demand side as well as sunk/fixed costs to differ by export mode. We find that demand and...

We investigate how firms adapt to trademark protection, an extensively used but underexamined form of IP protection, by exploring a historical precedent: China's trademark law of 1923---an unanticipated and disapproved response to end foreign privileges in China. By exploiting a unique, newly...

We analyze a seldom used, but highly promising form of rights-based management over common pool resources that involves the self-selection of heterogeneous fishermen into sectors. The fishery management regime assigns one portion of an overall catch quota to a voluntary cooperative, with the...

Using data from the National Basketball Association (NBA), we examine whether patterns of workplace cooperation occur disproportionately among workers of the same race. We find that, holding constant the composition of teammates on the floor, basketball players are no more likely to complete an...

We characterize the evolution over time of a network of credit relations among financial agents as a system of coupled stochastic processes. Each process describes the dynamics of individual financial robustness, while the coupling results from a network of liabilities among agents. The average...

To explain the extremely long-term persistence (more than 500 years) of positive historical experiences of cooperation (Putnam 1993), we model the intergenerational transmission of priors about the trustworthiness of others. We show that this transmission tends to be biased toward excessively...

Several authors suggest that trust is an important determinant of cooperation between strangers in a society, and therefore of performance of social institutions. We argue that trust should be particularly important for the performance of large organizations. In a cross-section of countries,...

Improving the efficiency of tax collection is important for development and fairness purposes. I study the Audit Exchange Information Agreements, which are agreements between the states and the U.S. federal government to exchange information about income tax audit plans and techniques, signed...