This paper develops and estimates a model of indivisibilities in shipping and economies of scale in consolidation. It uses highly detailed data on imports for which it is possible to observe the contents of individual containers. In the model, a firm is able to adapt to indivisibility...

The Melitz model highlights the importance of the extensive margin (the number of firms exporting) for trade flows. Using the World Bank's Exporter Dynamics Database (EDD) featuring firm-level exports from 50 countries, we find that around 50% of variation in exports is along the extensive...

The elasticity of substitution between home and foreign goods is one of the most important parameters in international economics. The international macro literature, which is primarily concerned with short-run business cycle fluctuations, assigns a low value to this parameter. The international...

What prevents the spread of information among coworkers, and which management practices facilitate workplace knowledge flows? We conducted a field experiment in a sales company, addressing these questions with three active treatments. (1) Encouraging workers to talk about their sales techniques...

In this paper we study the role of covenants in franchise contracts that restrict the recruitment and hiring of employees from other units within the same franchise chain in suppressing competition for workers. Based on an analysis of 2016 Franchise Disclosure Documents, we find that...

Banks' ratio of the market value to book value of their equity was close to 1 until the 1990s, then more than doubled during the 1996-2007 period, and fell again to values close to 1 after the 2008 financial crisis. Sarin and Summers (2016) and Chousakos and Gorton (2017) argue that the drop in...

Franchise jobs are often described as representing the epitome of the quot;low roadquot; approach to managing employees: high turnover, little training, deskilled jobs, and little employee involvement, practices often seen as unsophisticated. Research on franchise operations suggests, however,...