Commercial radio stations and advertisers have potentially conflicting interests about when commercial breaks should be played. This paper estimates an incomplete information timing game to examine stations' equilibrium timing incentives. It shows how identification can be aided by the existence...

Free entry into markets with decreasing average costs and differentiated products can result in an inefficient number of firms and suboptimal product variety. Because new firms and products draw their customers in part from existing products, concentration can affect incentives to enter as well...

A vast theoretical literature shows that inefficient market structures may arise in free entry equilibria. The inefficiency may manifest itself in the number, variety, or quality of products. Previous empirical work demonstrated that excessive entry may obtain in local radio markets. Our paper...

Radio signals are pure public goods whose total value to society is the sum of their value to advertisers and listeners. Because broadcasters can capture only part of the value of their product as revenue, there is the potential for a classic problem of underprovision. Small markets have much...

We investigate the welfare effects of vertical integration of regional sports networks (RSNs) with programming distributors in U.S. multichannel television markets. Vertical integration can enhance efficiency by reducing double marginalization and increasing carriage of channels, but can also...

We investigate the effect of hiring skilled immigrant employees on the performance of organizations. This relationship has been difficult to establish in prior work due to theoretical ambiguity, limited data, and inherent endogeneity. We overcome these difficulties by studying European football...

Economists are skeptical about the economic benefits of hosting "mega-events" such as the Olympic Games or the World Cup, since such activities have considerable cost and seem to yield few tangible benefits. These doubts are rarely shared by policy-makers and the population, who are typically...

Using data on over 900 firms for the period 1988-2000, we estimate the effect on phase-specific biotech and pharmaceutical R&D success rates of a firm's overall experience, its experience in the relevant therapeutic category; the diversification of its experience, and alliances with large and...

Increases in alliance activity between research-intensive firms and incumbents is puzzling since it is challenging to contract upon highly uncertain R&D activities. Our paper extends prior research by exploring the relationship between firm capabilities and preferences for control rights. This...