Product availability impacts many industries such as transportation, events, and retail, yet little empirical evidence documents the importance of stocking decisions for firm profits, vertical relationships, or consumers. We conduct several experiments, exogenously removing top-selling products...

Health care providers may vertically integrate not only to facilitate coordination of care, but also for strategic reasons that may not be in patients' best interests. Optimal Medicare reimbursement policy depends upon the extent to which each of these explanations is correct. To investigate, we...

We develop a new theory of the firm where asset owners sometimes want to change partners ex-post. The model identifies a fundamental trade-off between (i) a "displacement externality" under non-integration, where a partner leaves a relationship even though the benefit is worth less than the loss...

We use broad-based yet detailed data from the economy's goods-producing sectors to investigate firms' ownership of production chains. It does not appear that vertical ownership is primarily used to facilitate transfers of goods along the production chain, as is often presumed: Roughly one-half...

Contractual theories of vertical integration derive firm boundaries as an efficient response to market transaction costs. These theories predict a relationship between underlying features of transactions and observed integration decisions. There has been some progress in testing these...

The literature on multinationals and developing countries has examined the causalityquot; running from direct investment to changes in country characteristics (wages skills, etc.) and also the opposite direction of causality, from existing country characteristics toquot; inward direct...

This paper examines vertical arrangements in electricity markets. Vertically integrated wholesalers, or those with long-term contracts, have less incentive to raise wholesale prices when retail prices are determined beforehand. For three restructured markets, we simulate prices that define...

We study how the technological importance of inputs – measured by cost shares – is related to the decision to “make” or “buy” that input. Using detailed French international trade data and an instrumental variable approach based on self-constructed input-output tables, we show that...

We study the relationship between firms' output quality and their choice of organizational structure. To do so, we use data on each step of the production and transaction chain that makes up Peruvian fishmeal manufacturing. We first show that quality upgrading is an important motive for...

We provide an empirical study of bundling in a supply chain, referred to as fullline forcing. We use an extensive dataset on contracts between video retailers and movie distributors to analyze the choices made on both sides of the market: which distributors offer full-line forcing contracts,...