What happens to firms' organizational structure when they are hit by a negative shock? By matching employer-employee data with firm loans and bank balance sheets, I study firms’ reactions to a credit shock - the global financial crisis - and compare it to a trade shock - the entry of China in...

The severity and depth of the recent financial crisis hit many by surprise. Despite warning signs, the financial system seems to have been unable to aggregate existing information. As the events of Fall 2008 showed, many investors were caught off guard by the large number of banks collapsing...

We analyse the effects of investment decisions and firms internal organisation on the efficiency and stability of horizontal mergers. In our framework economies of scale are endogenous and there might be internal conflict within merged firms. We show that often stable mergers do not lead to more...

One can be independent, or subject to decisions made by others. This paper empirically tests whether individuals attach an intrinsic value to the institutional difference between independence and hierarchy. Taking self-employment as an important case of independence, it is shown that the...

Taxes levied on production processes (e.g. VAT), are today a very important source of government revenues in developed economies. Theories of optimal taxation conclude that these taxes are detrimental to production efficiency, when firms operate in perfectly competitive markets. These theories...

This paper examines the small world hypothesis. The first part of the paper presents empirical evidence on the evolution of a particular world: the world of journal publishing economists during the period 1970-2000. We find that in the 1970's the world of economics was a collection of islands,...

Multi-product exporters choose their product mix focusing on their best-performing products. Although their product mix varies across countries (the fickle fringe), the interdependence in demand or production technology making vectors of products systematically co-exported leads to commonalities...

This article studies incentives for a premium provider (Superstar) to offer exclusive contracts to competing platforms mediating the interactions between consumers and firms. When platform competition is intense, more consumers subscribe to the platform hosting the Superstar exclusively. This...

We trace the rise of the so called oligarchs in post-Soviet Russia and examine their relationship to income distribution in Russia. When Russia moved to a market economy in the 1990s a new business elite evolved. Russia's distinctive path towards market economy, among other factors, gave rise to...

This paper empirically investigates the advertising competition in the French broadcast television industry within a two-sided market framework. We use a unique dataset on the French broadcast television market including audience, prices, and quantities of advertising of twenty-one TV channels...