We have assessed the determinants of the choice of integration, relational contracting (keiretsu sourcing) and market sourcing by seven Japanese automobile manufacturers (OEMs) with respect to 54 components in light of contract economics. Our major findings are the following. First, the...

A large and growing share of international trade is carried on airplanes. Air cargo is many times more expensive than maritime transport but arrives in destination markets much faster. We model firms' choice between exporting goods using fast but expensive air cargo and slow but cheap ocean...

This paper develops a model of evolving standards for academic publishing. It is motivated by the increasing tendency of academic journals to require multiple revisions of articles and by changes in the content of articles. Papers are modeled as varying along two quality dimensions: q and r. The...

Over the last three decades there has been a dramatic increase in the length of time necessary to publish a paper in a top economics journal. This paper documents the slowdown and notes that a substantial part is due to an increasing tendency of journals to require that papers be extensively...

As patent data become more available in machine-readable form, an increasing number of researchers have begun to use measures based on patents and their citations as indicators of technological output and information flow. This paper explores the economic meaning of these citation-based patent...

A survey of recent patentees was conducted to elicit their perceptions regarding the importance of their inventions, the extent of their communication with other inventors, and the relationship of both importance and communication to observed patent citations. A cohort of 1993 patentees were...

This paper investigates the local impact of biomedical research on mortality in the USA. Causally estimating the marginal value of biomedical research is challenging due to a lack of micro data linking health outcomes to plausibly exogenous variation in research. We create a new linkage between...

In this paper, we review the growing literature on FinTech lending - the provision of credit facilitated by technology that improves the customer-lender interaction or lenders' screening and monitoring of borrowers. FinTech lending has grown rapidly, though in developed economies like the U.S....

Using Fontana et al.'s (2019) database, we analyze levels and trends in the global distribution of authorship in economics journals, disaggregating by country/region, quality of journal, and fields of specialization. We document striking imbalances. While Western and Northern European authors...

This paper studies how recent investigations of foreign influence in research have affected the productivity of U.S. scientists in the field of life sciences. Using data from PubMed and Dimensions during 2010-2020, we compare scientists who collaborated with scientists in China during 2010-2014...