In public sector procurement, social welfare often depends on the time taken to complete the contract. A leading example is highway construction, where slow completion times inflict a negative externality on commuters. Recently, highway departments have introduced innovative contracting methods...

We study the effect of menu costs on the pricing behavior of sellers and on the cross-sectional distribution of prices in the search-theoretic model of imperfect competition of Burdett and Judd (1983). We find that, when menu costs are small, the equilibrium is such that sellers follow a (Q,S,s)...

We propose a novel theory of self-fulfilling unemployment fluctuations. According to this theory, a firm hiring an additional worker creates positive external effects on other firms, as a worker has more income to spend and less time to search for low prices when he is employed than when he is...

In this paper we develop a multi-sector general equilibrium model of firm heterogeneity, worker heterogeneity and labor market frictions. We characterize the distributions of employment, unemployment, wages and income within and between sectors as a function of structural parameters. We find...

We present a model of endogenous firm growth with R&D investment and innovation as the engine of growth. The objective of our analysis is to present a framework that can be used for microeconometric analysis of firm performance in high-tech industries. The model for firm growth is a partial...

The paper studies equilibrium pricing in a product market for an indivisible good where buyers search for sellers. Buyers search sequentially for sellers, but do not meet every seller with the same probability. Specifically, a fraction of the buyers' meetings lead to one particular large seller,...

Recently, economists have developed methods for structural estimation of auction models. Many researchers object to these methods because they find the rationality assumptions used in these models to be implausible. In this paper, we explore whether structural auction models can generate...

We develop a model of imperfectly competitive insurers that compete with HMOs for consumers who have private information about their health status. We illustrate two conflicting effects of increasing HMO activity on conventional insurance premiums. We term these effects market discipline -- HMO...

This paper exploits the unique experiment of European market integration to investigate the relationship between integration and price convergence in international markets. Using a panel data set of car prices we examine how the process of integration has affected cross-country price dispersion...

We study the identification and estimation of Gorman-Lancaster style hedonic models of demand for differentiated products for the case when one product characteristic is not observed. Our identification and estimation strategy is a two-step approach in the spirit of Rosen (1974). Relative to...