In this paper we construct a short run model of the firm describing the behavior of thirteen U.S. airlines during the difficult transition to deregulation. Several modeling scenarios are developed to assess three common assumptions in cost studies: the use of time as a proxy for technological...

Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty highlights the role of “voice” in disciplining firms for low quality. We develop a formal model of voice as a relational contact between firms and consumers and show that voice is more likely to emerge in concentrated markets. We test this model using...

Increasing evidence indicates the importance of management in determining firms' productivity. Yet, causal evidence regarding the effectiveness of management practices is scarce, especially for high-skilled workers in the developed world. In an eight-month field experiment measuring the...

We analyze how firms renegotiate labor contracts to extract concessions from labor. While anecdotal evidence suggests that firms tend to renegotiate down wages in times of financial distress, there is no empirical evidence that documents such renegotiation, its determinants, and its magnitude....

We provide novel evidence linking the level of creditor protection provided by law to the degree of usage of technologically older, vintage capital in the airline industry. Using a panel of aircraft-level data around the world, we find that better creditor rights are associated with both...

Do bankrupt firms impose negative externalities on their non-bankrupt competitors? We propose and analyze a collateral channel in which a firm's bankruptcy reduces collateral values of other industry participants, thereby increasing the cost of external debt finance industry wide. To identify...

This paper investigates why passengers pay substantially different fares for travel on the same airline between the same two airports. We investigate questions that are fundamentally different from those in the existing literature on airline price dispersion. We use a unique new dataset to test...

We develop a simple theoretical framework for thinking about how geographic frictions, and in particular travel costs, shape scientists' collaboration decisions and the types of projects that are developed locally versus over distance. We then take advantage of a quasi-experiment — the...

Firms facing complex objectives often decompose the problems they face, delegating different parts of the decision to distinct sub-units. Using comprehensive data and internal models from a large U.S. airline, we establish that airline pricing is not well approximated by a model of the firm as a...

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, repeated airport closures due to potential security breaches have imposed substantial costs on travelers, airlines, and government agencies in terms of flight delays and cancellations. Using data from the year following September 11th, this study...