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 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...

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...

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 show that the main claim in Dennis, Gerardi, and Schenone (JF forthcoming) (DGS), namely “that the documented positive correlation between common ownership and ticket prices stems from the market share component of the common ownership measure, and not the ownership and control...

We construct a novel data set to show that, between 2003-2020, up to one-fifth of America’s largest firms had a non-financial blockholder or insider as their largest shareholder. Blockholders and insiders tend to be less diversified than institutional investors. Measures of “universal” and...

The exceptional export performance of foreign-owned firms is a well-established stylized fact, but the underlying mechanism is not yet fully understood. In this paper, we provide theory and empirical evidence demonstrating that this fact can be explained by ownership differences in access to...

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...