This paper models payment evasion as a source of profit by letting the firm choose the purchase price and the fine imposed on detected payment evaders. For a given price and fine, the consumers purchase, evade payment, or choose the outside option. We show that payment evasion leads to a form of...

Using data on U.S. universities, we show that universities that give higher royalty shares to faculty scientists generate greater license income, controlling for university size, academic quality, research funding and other factors. We use pre-sample data on university patenting to control for...

Why have state-owned firms been so common? One explanation, proposed in the past, is that if state firms can be induced to maximize pretax profits, then state ownership may be less inefficient than private ownership when corporate tax rates are high. If this argument were right, the capital...

The majority of enterprises in China are controlled by local governments at the provincial, city, county, township and village levels. We study the effect of regional decentralization on soft budget constraints in these enterprises. We show that fiscal competition under (foreign) capital...

Investment liberalizing countries are often concerned that cross-border mergers & acquisitions might have an adverse effect on domestic firms and benefit multinational enterprises (MNEs). Given that domestic assets are sufficiently scarce, we identify a preemption effect and an asset...

This paper is an empirical study of the motives for charitable donations, based on a unique data set of the English National Opera. Merging all their box office and fundraising data, our data set not only contains individuals’ donations, but also their opera attendance and all the fringe...

The present paper discusses the role of quality in patent systems from the perspective of patent offices' behavior and organization. After documenting original stylized facts, the paper presents a model in which patent offices set patent fees and the quality level of their examination processes....

In many markets, such as education, health care and public utilities, firms are often profit-constrained either due to regulation or because they have non-profit status. At the same time such firms might have altruistic concerns towards consumers. In this paper we study semi-altruistic firms’...

In a spatial competition setting there is usually a non-negative relationship between competition and quality. In this paper we offer a novel mechanism whereby competition leads to lower quality. This mechanism relies on two key assumptions, namely that the providers are motivated and...

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluate whether increased choice increased demand elasticity faced by hospitals...