Despite widespread application of real options theory in the literature, the extent to which firms actually delay irreversible investments following an increase in the uncertainty of their environment is not empirically well-known. This paper estimates firms' responsiveness to changes in...

Since the mid-1980s many authors have investigated the influence of information technology (IT) on productivity. Until recently there has been no clear evidence that productivity increases as a result of IT spending. This productivity paradox is partly due to the difficulty in correctly...

Using firm-, industry-, and country-level data, we document a link between family ownership and labor relations. Across countries, we find that family ownership is relatively more prevalent in countries in which labor relations are difficult, consistent with firm-level evidence suggesting that...

When a firm forms a market closes. Resources that were previously allocated via the price system are allocated by managerial authority within the firm. We explore this choice of organizational form using a model of price formation in which agents negotiate prices on behalf of their principals...

In order to study networks of collaboration between researchers, we propose a simple measure of the intensity of collaboration, which can be easily interpreted in terms of relative probability and aggregated at the laboratory level. We first use this measure to characterize the relations of...

The empirical literature on contagion has mainly measured the propagation of shocks across countries using daily stock markets, interest rates, and exchange rates. Several methodologies have been used for this purpose, however, the properties of the data introduces important limitations on the...

Innovation was rampant in the computer industry during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Did innovation vastly extend the capabilities of computers or simply reduce the costs of doing the same thing? This question goes to the heart of whether the rate of decline in 'constant-quality' computing...

In this paper, I develop a new identification method to solve the problem of simultaneous equations, based on heteroskedasticity of the structural shocks. I show that if the heteroskedasticity can be described as a two-regime process, then the system is just identified under relatively weak...

This paper uses the invariance principle to solve the incidental parameter problem. We seek group actions that preserve the structural parameter and yield a maximal invariant in the parameter space with fixed dimension. M-estimation from the likelihood of the maximal invariant statistic yields...

Dealing with endogenous regressors is a central challenge of applied research. The standard solution is to use instrumental variables that are assumed to be uncorrelated with unobservables. We instead assume (i) the correlation between the instrument and the error term has the same sign as the...