This paper considers functions of contracting other than the protection of relationship-specific investments and the provision of marginal incentives, and applies the theory to explain variation in the form of compensation of over-the-road truck drivers in the U.S. Specifically, we argue that...

DuPont, one of the most respectable U.S. companies, caused environmental damage that ended up costing the company around a billion dollars. By using internal company documents disclosed in trials we rule out the possibilities that this bad outcome was due to ignorance, an unexpected realization,...

The effects of market and technological conditions on the investment and markup behavior of firms, and their resulting impacts on economic performance, are closely interrelated and complex. In this paper determinants of and linkages among these are explored for two industries with very different...

In order to better capture the close relationship between firms' cross-border trading activities and the sales and purchasing activities of their foreign affiliates, this paper proposes supplementary accounting formats that classify cross-border and foreign affiliate activities on an ownership...

Food manufacturing and processing is an important link between agricultural producers and consumers in the agricultural supply chain. The food manufacturing sector in the United States is both increasingly mechanized and increasingly concentrated. Consequently, labor risks in food manufacturing...

We use a detailed micro dataset on product availability to construct a direct high-frequency measure of consumer product shortages during the 2020-2021 pandemic. We document a widespread multi-fold rise in shortages in nearly all sectors early in the pandemic. Over time, the composition of...

The food supply chain has experienced major disruptions from both demand and supply sides during the Covid-19 pandemic. While some consequences such as food waste are directly caused by the disruption due to supply chain inefficiency, others are indirectly caused by a change in consumer's...

Supply chains for many agricultural products have an hour-glass shape; in between a sizable number of farmers and consumers is a smaller number of processors. The concentrated nature of the meat processing sectors in the United States implies that disruption of the processing capacity of any one...

This paper examines the structure, behavior and performance of the N95 respirator market in the U.S. before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-early 2022). It focuses on the behavior and performance of government and private sector organizations in the allocation of scarce supplies of N95...

The United States imports intermediate inputs from China, helping downstream US firms to expand employment. Using a cross-regional reduced-form specification but differing from the existing literature, this paper (a) incorporates a supply chain perspective, (b) uses intermediate input imports...