Large multi-product firms dominate international trade flows. This paper documents new facts about multi-product manufacturing exporters that are not easily reconciled with existing multi-product models. Using novel linked production and export data at the firm-product level, we find that the...

Existing research has focused on why and when firms may choose to access the external technology market. Surprisingly, however, less is known about the reliability of the patents attached to these external technologies in the face of litigation. “Weak” external patents expose a firm to the...

When should a government provide a service inhouse and when should it contract out provision? We develop a model in which the provider can invest in improving the quality of service or reducing cost. If contracts are incomplete, the private provider has a stronger incentive to engage in both...

We examine the within- and across-firm shipment decisions of tens of thousands of goods-producing and distributing establishments. This allows us to quantify the normally unobservable forces that determine firm boundaries; which transactions are mediated by ownership control, as opposed to...

There is considerable debate over whether international trade has contributed to the declining economic fortunes of less skilled workers. One issue that has become lost in the current discussion is how firms respond to import competition and how these responses, in turn, are transmitted to the...

Many economists studying America's wage divergence in the 1980's have concluded that its primary cause was a within-industry shift in relative labor demand toward the more-skilled. Following the modeling framework and empirical methods developed in Slaughter (1993), in this paper I try to...

Explaining patterns of asset ownership in the economy is a central goal of both organizational economics and industrial organization. We develop a model of asset ownership in trucking, which we test by examining how the adoption of different classes of on-board computers (OBCs) between 1987 and...

This paper provides a model-based empirical strategy to, (i) detect the presence and gauge the magnitude of government subsidies and (ii) quantify their impact on production reallocation across countries, industry prices, costs and consumer surplus. I construct and estimate an industry model...

In many developing countries, the average firm is small, does not grow and has low productivity. Lack of market integration and limited information on non-local products often leave consumers unaware of the prices and quality of non-local firms. They therefore mostly buy locally, limiting firms'...

Despite the historic prevalence of industrial policy and its current popularity, few empirical studies directly evaluate its welfare consequences. This paper examines an important industrial policy in China in the 2000s, aiming to propel the country’s shipbuilding industry to the largest...