Despite their importance to the supply of prescription drugs, there has been limited research on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and their vertical relationships to insurers and drug manufacturers. This paper provides an overview of the current state of research on this topic, motivates why...

In this paper, we estimate the benefits to countries that purchase goods from China of having access to intermediary services provided by Hong Kong. Traders in Hong Kong supply information on markets and producers in China, which provides welfare gains to foreign firms using these services....

Motivated by evidence on the importance of incomplete information and networks in international trade, we investigate the supply of 'network intermediation.' We hypothesize that the agents who become international trade intermediaries first accumulate networks of foreign contacts while working...

Congress may soon restrict joint and several liability for cleanup of contaminated sites under Superfund. We explore whether this change would discourage settlements and is therefore likely to increase the program's already high litigation costs. Recent theoretical research by Kornhauser and...

The emerging empirical literature on the economics of arbitration has focused primarily on the behavior of arbitrators under alternative forms of arbitration. This article suggests that it is natural for empirical economists to now expand their focus to include issues related to the behavior of...

This note reexamines the theory of optimal public enforcement when litigation costs are incurred if the defendant is prosecuted at trial, and when an out-of-court settlement is possible. Using a numerical example, it is shown that settlements and litigation costs can substantially alter the...

This paper analyses data on union and employer rankings of different panels of arbitrators in an actual arbitration system. A random utility model of bargainer preferences is developed and estimated. The estimates indicate that unions and employers have similar preferences, in favor of lawyers,...

This study analyzes a new set of data on the decisions of conventional arbitrators. The main goal is to draw inferences about the extent to which conventional arbitration decisions are fashioned as mechanical compromises of the parties' final offers, without reference to the exogenous facts...

This paper argues that firms have an informational advantage over consumers in selecting arbitrators in consumer arbitration. We document how the selection process impacts arbitration outcomes by studying roughly 9,000 consumer arbitration cases in the securities industry. Securities disputes...

This chapter surveys the contributions of laboratory experiments to labor economics. We begin with a discussion of methodological issues: why (and when) is a lab experiment the best approach; how do laboratory experiments compare to field experiments; and what are the main design issues? We then...