This paper examines the effects of upgrading product quality standards on product and professional labor-market equilibriums when both markets are regulated. The Japanese government revised the Building Standards Act in June 2007, requiring a stricter review process for admitting the plans of...

By relaxing the common efficiency wage assumption of exogenous shirking detection probabilities, we demonstrate how standards and efficiency wages are related. In a more general setting where the probability of detection depends upon the equilibrium effort level of non-shirkers, we show that the...

The evidence suggests that relational contracting and legal rules play an important role in credit markets but on the basis of the prevailing field data it is difficult to pin down their causal impact. Here we show experimentally that relational incentives are a powerful causal determinant for...

This study models producer protection legislation that would grant growers the right to claim damages (PPLD) if their contracts are prematurely terminated. In the absence of contracting frictions that prevent contractors from redesigning contracts to accommodate exogenous policy changes, PPLD...

We use unique plant-level data to study the link between the local availability of services and the decision of manufacturing firms to source materials from abroad. To guide our empirical analysis we develop a monopolistic-competition model of the materials sourcing decisions of heterogeneous...

This paper estimates the effects of temporary driver's license suspensions on driving behavior. A little known rule in the German traffic penalty catalogue maintains that drivers who commit a series of speeding transgressions within 365 days should have their license suspended for one month. My...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has led to temporary suspensions of many occupational licensing laws, especially for health care professionals, in an effort to manage surges in health care demand. The crisis highlights more general concerns about occupational licensing laws, yet convincing empirical...

Twelve U.S. states, plus the District of Columbia, have recently enacted measures granting undocumented immigrants access to driving licenses. We exploit the state and temporal variation in the issuing of state driving licenses to undocumented immigrants to estimate its impact on these...