Political connections between firms and autocratic regimes are not secret and often even publicly displayed in many developing economies. We argue that tying a firm's available rent to a regime's survival acts as a credible commitment forcing entrepreneurs to support the government and to exert...

We study the role of firms in the political economy of trade agreements. Using detailed information from lobbying reports filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, we find that virtually all firms that lobby on free trade agreements (FTAs) support their ratification. Moreover, relative to...

We study the relationship between a key early intervention policy designed to support families with children up to the age of four and the rate at which children are taken into social care. The gradual build-up of over 3,600 Sure Start Children's Centres (SSCC), operated by Local Authorities...

We study how furlough affects household financial distress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furlough increases the probability of late housing and bill payments by 30% and 9%, respectively. The effects exist for individuals who rent their home, but not mortgagees who can mitigate financial distress...

If firms compete in all-pay auctions with complete information, silent shareholdings introduce asymmetric externalities into the all-pay auction framework. If the strongest firm owns a large share in the second strongest firm, this may make the strongest firm abstain from bidding. As a...

We conduct an empirical investigation into the effects of foreign ownership on worker skills using firm-level data from Spain. To control for endogeneity bias due to selection into foreign ownership, we combine a difference-in-differences approach with a propensity score weighting estimator. Our...

This paper develops and applies a test of the property rights theory of the firm in the context of global input sourcing. We use the model by Pol Antràs and Elhanan Helpman, “Global Sourcing,” Journal of Political Economy, 112:3 (2004), 552-80, to derive a new prediction regarding how the...

Is ownership change an opportunity for new owners to make systematic changes in the workforce of the acquired plant? We document changes to the workforce along observable and unobservable dimensions of worker quality around ownership change using matched employer-employee data. We observe above...

We examine the profitability of cross-ownership in an oligopolistic industry where firms compete as Cournot rivals. We consider a symmetric cross-ownership structure in which a subset of k firms engage in cross-shareholding and each firm has an equal silent financial interest in the other firms,...