The Hotelling locational model and its adaptations to a circular city provide a core framework for research in industrial organization. The present paper expands the explanatory power of this model by incorporating a continuum of consumers with constant-elasticity demand functions along with...

We present a mechanism based on managerial incentives through which common ownership affects product market outcomes. Firm-level variation in common ownership causes variation in managerial incentives and productivity across firms, which leads to intra-industry and intra-firm cross-market...

We study whether banks are riskier if managers have less liability. We focus on New England between 1867 and 1880 and consider the introduction of marital property laws that limited liability for newly wedded bankers. We find that banks with managers who married after a legal change had more...

Limited liability and asymmetric information between an investment bank and its lenders provide an incentive for a bank to undercapitalise and finance overly risky business projects. To counter this market failure, national governments have imposed solvency constraints on banks. However, these...

This paper shows that the informativeness principle does not automatically extend to settings with limited liability. Even if a signal is informative about effort, it may have no value for contracting. An agent with limited liability is paid zero for certain output realizations. Thus, even if...

We study the extent to which collusion can explain the under-provision of clean sanitation technologies in developing countries. Using desludging services in Dakar as a case-study, we document that prices are 66% higher in areas where prices are likely coordinated by a large trade association,...

This paper shows that product design shapes search frictions and that intermediaries leverage this channel to increase their rents in the context of the U.S. municipal bond market. The majority of bonds are designed via negotiations between a local government and its underwriter. They are then...

The United States spends twice as much per person on pharmaceuticals as European countries, in large part because prices are much higher in the US. This fact has led policymakers to consider legislation for price controls. This paper assesses the effects of a US international reference pricing...

We show that supply networks are inefficiently, and insufficiently, resilient. Upstream firms can expand their production capacity to hedge against supply and demand shocks. But the social benefits of such investments are not internalized due to market power and market incompleteness. Upstream...

Attribute-based subsidies (ABS) are commonly used to promote the diffusion of energy-efficient products, whose manufacturers often wield significant market power. We develop a theoretical framework for the optimal design of ABS to account for endogenous product attributes, environmental...