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,...

We examine the returns from owning cows and buffaloes in rural India. We estimate that when valuing labor at market wages, households earn large, negative average returns from holding cows and buffaloes, at negative 64% and negative 39% respectively. This puzzle is mostly explained if we value...

We consider the release of information by a firm when the manager has discretion regarding the timing of its release. While it is well known that firms appear to delay the release of bad news, we examine how external information about the state of the economy (or the industry) affects this...

We utilize a unique database from a large legal services provider to examine how service quality responds to the firm's available capacity and workload, and to the nature of the firm-client relationship. We develop empirical measures of both the (internal) level of resources available to the...

We apply program evaluation methods to analyze the effectiveness of two types of preferential regional policy programs in China's manufacturing sector. Economic and Technological Development Zones (ETDZs) aim to facilitate firms' internationalization strategies. Science and Technology Industrial...

We have conducted the first survey on management practices in transition countries. We found that Central Asian transition countries, such as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, have on average very poor management practices. Their average scores are below emerging countries such as Brazil, China and...

We exploit time variation in the degree of development of local credit markets and matched employer-employee data to assess the role of the firm as an internal credit market. In less developed local credit markets firms can offer a flatter wage-tenure profile than firms in more developed credit...

In this chapter we examine the relationship between Human Resource Management (HRM) and productivity. HRM includes incentive pay (individual and group) as well as many non-pay aspects of the employment relationship such as matching (hiring and firing) and work organization (e.g. teams,...

This paper studies the promotion policy of a large, hi-tech manufacturing Japanese firm. We find that the company has multiple ports of entry and hires a significant number of employees with previous job experience. In addition, cohort-peer differentiation in promotion starts much earlier than...

This paper examines some of the determinants of total factor productivity growth using a sample of 216 large UK firms observed over the period 1974–90, and then using three further samples which were used to check the robustness of the results. The main focus of the paper is on identifying the...