All industrialized countries experienced a transition from high birth rates and stagnant standards of living to low birth rates and sustained growth in per capita income. What contributed to this transformation? Were output and population dynamics driven by common or separate forces? We develop...

I provide empirical evidence that badly governed firms respond more to aggregate shocks than do well governed firms. I build a simple model where managers are prone to over-invest and where shareholders are more willing to tolerate such a behavior in good times. The model successfully explains...

In the summer of 1997, several East Asian countries experienced a dramatic devaluation of their currencies both in nominal and in real terms, stock prices collapsed and output fell. Later in that year several Latin American countries were also affected, followed by Brazil and Russia in 1998....

We consider a simple model of market structure determination with discrete product differentiation and strategic interaction between firms. Our equilibrium concept is based on a set of relatively weak conditions that describe the profits of active and potential firms in a market. In our model,...

Despite the pervasiveness of industry regulation, there are few studies of its impact on industry productivity. Assessing regulation's impact on productivity has been difficult for a number of reasons, including the complexity of regulations and the difficulty measuring productivity. We study an...

We provide a framework for inference in discrete games that involve multiple decision makers and use it to study airline market structure in the US. We make inferences on a ``class of models'' rather that looking for point identifying assumptions that pin down a unique model. We extend the...

This paper studies the economics of intellectual property transfer using new data on the transfers of patents. We first present evidence about how the transfer and the expiration of patents relate to age, patent citations received, whether the patent has been previously traded or not, and the...

We propose a method for point estimation of discrete games similar to those considered by Bresnahan and Reiss (1991). In the model, the vNM utilities are a function of observed co-variates and random preference shocks. The model also explicitly parametrizes the probability of selecting a given...

We describe a two-step algorithm for estimating dynamic games under the assumption that behavior is consistent with Markov Perfect Equilibrium. In the first step, the policy functions and the law of motion for the state variables are estimated. In the second step, the remaining structural...

Three of the most important recent facts in global macroeconomics — the sustained rise in the US current account deficit, the stubborn decline in long run real rates, and the rise in the share of US assets in global portfolio — appear as anomalies from the perspective of...