The manufacturing sector in Taiwan has a market structure composed of large numbers of small firms, a focus on less capital-intensive industries, and a dense network of firms specializing in subcontracting and trading services. It has been argued that these features lower the start-up costs of...

Although typically overlooked, many purchase datasets exhibit a high incidence of products with zero sales. We propose a new estimator for the Random-Coefficients Logit demand system for purchase datasets with zero-valued market shares. The identification of the demand parameters is based on a...

COVID-19 led to a massive shutdown of businesses in the second quarter of 2020. Estimates from the CPS, for example, indicate that the number of active business owners dropped by 22 percent from February to April 2020. In this descriptive research note, we provide the first analysis of losses in...

We analyze the use of intellectual property (IP) by firms in Chile over the decade 1995-2005 as the then middle-income country experienced rapid economic growth of 4.7 percent per year. We use a novel dataset that contains a combination of detailed firm-level information from the annual...

Middlemen are ubiquitous in supply chains. In developing countries they help bring products from remote communities to end markets but may exert strong market power. We study a cooperative intervention which organizes together poor fishing communities in the Amazon -- one of the poorest and most...

Using Visa debit and credit card transactions in the U.S. from 2016 to 2019, we document the importance of customers in accounting for sales variation across merchants, across stores within retail chains, and over time for individual merchants and stores. Customers, as opposed to transactions...

The level of diseconomies of scale in asset management has important implications for tests of manager skill and the expected level of performance persistence. To identify the causal impact of fund size on future returns, we exploit the fact that small differences in returns can cause discrete...

Alternatives to the current system of separate tax accounting, such as the proposed Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base in Europe, would apportion a firm's worldwide profits using formulas based on the location of employment, capital or sales. This paper offers a new method of evaluating the...

This paper uses data from NBER surveys of over 40,000 employees in hundreds of facilities in 14 firms and from employees on the 2002 and 2006 General Social Surveys to explore how shared compensation affects turnover, absenteeism, loyalty, worker effort, and other outcomes affecting workplace...

We investigate how the employment-based health insurance system in the U.S. affects individuals' life-cycle health-care decisions. We take the viewpoint that health is a form of human capital that affects workers' productivities on the job, and derive implications of employees' turnover on the...