Middlemen are ubiquitous in supply chains. In developing countries they help bring products from remote communities to end markets but may exert strong market power. We study a cooperative intervention which organizes together poor fishing communities in the Amazon -- one of the poorest and most...

This paper studies the real estate brokerage industry in Greater Boston, an industry with low entry barriers and substantial turnover. Using a comprehensive dataset of agents and transactions from 1998-2007, we find that entry does not increase sales probabilities or reduce the time it takes for...

Fiduciary duty may combat principal-agent problems in the provision of financial advice, but it may also impose costs through legal liability. We study the effects of fiduciary duty on the deferred annuity market using transaction-level data. Leveraging state-level variation in common law...

While observers agree that courts function poorly in developing countries, a lack of data has limited our understanding of the causes of malfunction. We combine data from administrative records on severance cases filed in the Mexico City Labor Court with interventions that provide information to...

Intermediaries in decentralized markets can affect buyer welfare both directly, by reducing expenses for buyers with high search cost and indirectly, through a search-externality that affects the prices paid by buyers that do not use intermediaries. I investigate the magnitude of these effects...

Housing market transactions are a matter of public record and thus provide a rare opportunity to analyze the behavior, performance, and strategies of individual investors. Using data for all housing transactions in the Los Angeles area from 1988-2009, this paper provides empirical evidence on...

We study the impact of investor heterogeneity on mutual fund market segmentation. To motivate our empirical analysis, we make two assumptions. First, some investors inherently value broker services. Second, because brokers are only compensated when they sell mutual funds, they have little...

Prior to the subprime crisis, mortgage brokers originated about 65% of all subprime mortgages. Yet little is known about their behavior during the runup to the crisis. Using data from New Century Financial Corporation, we find that brokers earned an average revenue of $5,300 per funded loan. We...

The theory of international trade has paid scant attention to market institutions. Neither neoclassical theory nor new trade models typically specify the process by which supply and demand meet. Yet in the real world, intermediaries play a central role in materializing the gains from exchange...

This paper develops a simple model of international trade with intermediation. We consider an economy with two islands and two types of agents, farmers and traders. Farmers can produce two goods, but in order to sell these goods in centralized (Walrasian) markets, they need to be matched with a...