It has been argued that Asia's remarkable economic achievements of the past 50 years build on institutional arrangements very different from the West, notably the central role of business groups (BGs). As Asian economies move from extensive to intensive growth, we enquire whether the business...

The existing delegation literature has focused on different preferences of principal and agent concerning project selection, which makes delegating authority costly for the principal. This paper shows that delegation has a cost even when the preferences of principal and agent are exogenously...

We characterize optimal incentive contracts in a moral hazard framework extended in two directions. First, after effort provision, the agent is free to leave and pursue some ex-post outside option. Second, the value of this outside option is increasing in effort, and hence endogenous. Optimal...

Although market concentration is one of the main impediments to productivity growth globally, data constraints have limited its analysis to developed countries or cross-country studies based on definitions of market concentration across nations and industries. This paper takes advantage of a...

Guest workers on visas in the United States may be unable to quit bad employers due to barriers to mobility and a lack of labor market competition. Using H-1B, H-2A, and H-2B program data, we calculate the concentration of employers in geographically defined labor markets within occupations. We...

Understanding the economic and social effects of the recent global trends of rising market concentration and market power has become a policy priority. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper introduces a simple simulation method, the Welfare and Competition tool (WELCOM), to estimate with...

We provide the first estimates of the extent of common ownership of competing firms in Australia. Combining data on market shares and substantial shareholdings, we calculate the impact of common ownership on effective market concentration. Among firms where we can identify at least one owner, 31...

This paper brings together the modern research on employer power and employee power by empirically examining the effects of unionization on worker earnings, employment, and inequality across differently concentrated markets. Exploiting national tax reforms to union membership dues as exogenous...

Business groups, which are ubiquitous in emerging market economies, balance the advantages of characteristics such as internal capital markets with the disadvantages such as inefficient internal distribution of resources and suppression of technological and other forms of innovativeness. In this...

We merge firm-level data on ownership linkages with administrative data on German workers to analyze how the position in a business group hierarchy affects workers' wages. To acknowledge that ownership linkages are not onedirectional, we propose an index of hierarchical distance to the ultimate...