Entering a currency union without any political union European countries have taken a gamble: will the needs of the currency union force a political integration (as anticipated by Monnet) or will the tensions create a backlash, as suggested by Kaldor, Friedman and many others? We try to answer...

Cartels participating in procurement auctions frequently use bid rotation or prioritize incumbents to allocate contracts. However, establishing a link between observed allocation patterns and firm conduct has been difficult: there are cost-based competitive explanations for such patterns. We...

We examine the institutional details of the school milk procurement process, bidding data, statements of dairy executives, and supply characteristics in Ohio during the 1980's. We compare the bidding behavior of a group of firms to a control group. We find that the behavior of each of the firms...

Collective reputation implies an important externality. Among firms trading internationally, quality shocks about one firm's products could affect the demand of other firms from the same origin country. We study this issue in the context of a large-scale scandal that affected the Chinese dairy...

"This paper analyzes job flows in a sample of 16 industrial and emerging economies over the past decade, exploiting a harmonized firm-level dataset. It shows that industry and firm size effects (and especially firm size) account for a large fraction in the overall variability in job flows....

"This paper studies empirically the relationship between trade policy and individual income risk faced by workers, and uses the estimates of this empirical analysis to evaluate the welfare effect of trade reform. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, longitudinal data on workers are used...

Based on a survey questionnaire administered to 1478 R&D labs in the U.S. manufacturing sector in 1994, we find that firms typically protect the profits due to invention with a range of mechanisms, including patents, secrecy, lead time advantages and the use of complementary marketing and...

This study examines the impact of unions on wages and employment using data from Uruguay in a period where unions were banned (1973-1984), then legalized with tripartite bargaining (1984-1991) followed by industry-wide or firm-specific bargaining (1992-1997). The relationship between wages and...