The uniform pricing puzzle for vertically differentiated products states that a monopolist sells high and low quality products at the same price despite the fact that quality is perfectly observable and that there are no significant costs of adjusting prices. The puzzle is relevant for movies,...

A firm's productivity depends on how production is organized given the level of demand for its product. To capture this mechanism, we develop a theory of an economy where firms with heterogeneous demands use labor and knowledge to produce. Entrepreneurs decide the number of layers of management...

In most developed countries, the provision of water is organized at a local level. The costs and tariffs vary significantly, even between adjacent water utilities. Such heterogeneity is an obvious indication of the sector’s overall inefficiency and stresses a need for institutional...

We analyze incentives to develop entrepreneurial ideas for venture capitalists (VCs) and incumbent firms. If VCs are sufficiently better at judging an idea's value and if it is sufficiently more costly to patent low than high value ideas, VCs acquire valuable ideas, develop them beyond the level...

Many new exporters give up exporting very shortly, despite substantial entry costs; others shoot up foreign sales and expand to new destinations. We develop a model based on experimentation to rationalize these and other dynamic patterns of exporting firms. We posit that individual export...

When a firm decides which products to offer or put on display, it takes into account the products' ability to attract attention to the brand name as a whole. Thus, the value of a product to the firm emanates from the consumer demand it directly meets, as well as the indirect demand it generates...

We examine whether stock market-listed firms in the U.S. invest suboptimally due to agency costs resulting from separation of ownership and control. We derive testable predictions to distinguish between underinvestment due to rational “short-termism” and overinvestment due to “empire...

We study a market model in which competing firms use costly marketing devices to influence the set of alternatives which consumers perceive as relevant. Consumers in our model are boundedly rational in the sense that they have an imperfect perception of what is relevant to their decision...

The theoretical effects of labour regulations such as employment protection legislation (EPL) on innovation is ambiguous, and empirical evidence has thus far been inconclusive. EPL increases job security and the greater enforceability of job contracts may increase worker investment in innovative...

This Paper analyses the effects of ownership structure on corporate environmental performance and examines the link from financial performance to environmental performance in a transition economy. In particular, it analyses these ownership effects and this performance link using an unbalanced...