The fall of labor's share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well documented but its causes remain uncertain. Existing empirical assessments of trends in labor's share typically have relied on industry or macro data, obscuring heterogeneity among firms. In...

Studies of the firm's demand for factor inputs often assume a constant rate of utilization of the inputs and ignore the fact that the firm can simultaneously choose the level and the rate of utilization of its inputs. In particular, the literature on dynamic factor demand models has, until...

Typically measures of multifactor productivity growth have been based on a production and optimization framework that assumes all inputs are instantaneously adjustable, thus ignoring the important impacts of short run fixity of certain inputs. This paper focuses on the distinction between short...

In this paper we develop measures of economic capacity output and economic capacity utilization for firms producing multiple outputs and having one or .ore quasi-fixed inputs. Although we produce an impossibility theorem showing that based only on the assumption of cost minimization, the concept...

The recent fall of labor's share of GDP in numerous countries is well-documented, but its causes are poorly understood. We sketch a “superstar firm” model where industries are increasingly characterized by “winner take most” competition, leading a small number of highly profitable (and...

The heavy-tailed distribution of firm sizes first discovered by Zipf (1949) is one of the best established empirical facts in economics. We show that it has strong implications for asset pricing. Due to the concentration of the market portfolio when the distribution of the capitalization of...

In the context of a model that distinguishes between large money center banks and smaller regional banks, we show that the percentage of a country's debt held by the large banks affects the secondary market price of that country's debt: the higher the concentration of the debt, the higher the...

We propose an economic model of business groups that allows for the cooperative behavior of groups of firms, where the number and size of each group is determined endogenously. In this framework, more than one configuration of groups can arise in equilibrium: several different types of business...

In this paper, we provide a conceptual framework for understanding the phenomenon of exclusive dealing, and we explore the motivations for and effects of its use. For a broad class of models, we characterize the outcome of a contracting game in which manufacturers may employ exclusive dealing...