We model retail-price recommendations (RPRs) as a communication device in vertical supply relations with private manufacturer information on production costs and consumer demand. With static trade, RPRs are irrelevant, and the equilibrium outcome is inefficient. With repeated trade, RPRs can...

We use broad-based yet detailed data from the economy's goods-producing sectors to investigate firms' ownership of production chains. It does not appear that vertical ownership is primarily used to facilitate transfers of goods along the production chain, as is often presumed: roughly one-half...

We examine a dynamic model of voluntary disclosure of multiple pieces of private information. In our model, a manager of a firm who may learn multiple signals over time interacts with a competitive capital market and maximizes payoffs that increase in both period prices. We show (perhaps...

Team production takes advantage of technological complementarities but comes with the cost of free-ridership. When workers differ in skills, the choice of sorting pattern may be associated with a nontrivial trade-off between exploiting the technological complementarities and minimizing the cost...

Recent studies have shown that the dynamics of firms (growth, job reallocation, and exit) are negatively correlated with the initial size of the firm and its age. In this paper we analyze whether financial factors, in addition to technological differences, are important in generating these...

A significant policy concern about the emerging plaintiff legal funding industry is that loans will undermine settlement. When the plaintiff has private information about damages, we find that the optimal (plaintiff-funder) loan induces all plaintiff types to make the same demand, resulting in...

Washington's "revolving door"––the movement from government service into the lobbying industry––is regarded as a major concern for policy-making. We study how ex-government staffers benefit from the personal connections acquired during their public service. Lobbyists...

The author develops a model in which a firm's only asset is its name, which summarizes its reputation, and studies the forces that cause names to be valuable, tradable assets. An adverse selection model in which shifts of ownership are not observable guarantees an active market for names with...