We introduce a simple oligopolistic trade model with international transportation costs, and analyze the profitability and the social desirability of national vs. international mergers in relation to three different issues, (i) the level of trade freeness, (ii) the possibility of rent...

Adam Smith alleged that secret employer collusion to reduce labor earnings is common. This paper examines an important case of such behavior: no-poach agreements through which technology companies agreed not to compete for each other’s workers. Exploiting the plausibly exogenous timing of a US...

A large body of evidence suggests that social comparisons matter for workers' valuation of the wage they receive. The consequences of social comparisons in imperfectly competitive labor markets are less well understood. We analyze an oligopsonistic model of the labor market where workers derive...

We evaluate the impact of the Washington State Attorney General's enforcement campaign against employee no-poaching clauses in franchising contracts, which unfolded from 2018 through early 2020. Implementing a staggered difference-in-differences research design using Burning Glass Technologies...

Medical providers often have a significant influence on treatment decisions which they can use in their own financial interest. Classical models of supplier-induced demand predict that medical providers will supply fewer services if they face increasing prices. We test this prediction based on a...

Pay-what-you-want schemes can be a useful tool to finance high quality and independent news media without restricting readership, therefore guaranteeing maximum diffusion. We conduct a field experiment with the Italian information site lavoce.info to explore how to structure a campaign in a way...

We use a unique design feature of a survey of Italian firms to study the causal effect of inflation expectations on firms' economic decisions. In the survey, a randomly chosen subset of firms is repeatedly treated with information about recent inflation (or the European Central Bank's inflation...

This paper investigates price-setting for truly homogenous products sold in markets without any formal trade barriers. We use data from IKEA, a furniture company selling identical products in an identical shopping environment in different EU countries. We get four remarkable outcomes: 1) The law...

This paper extends Hall's (1988) methodology to analyse imperfections in both the product and the labour market for firms in the Belgian manufacturing industry over the period 1988-1995. We investigate the heterogeneity in price-cost mark-up and workers' bargaining power parameters among 18...