Moral hazard is endemic to employment relationships and firms often use performance pay and managerial control to address this problem. While performance pay has received much empirical attention, managerial control has not. We analyze data from a managerial-control field experiment in which an...

We review the literature on financial intermediation in the process by which new medical therapeutics are financed, developed, and delivered. We discuss the contributing factors that lead to a key finding in the literature--underinvestment in biomedical R&D--and focus on the role that banks and...

This paper considers the consequences of a two-sector vertically-integrated model of firms producing output using firm-specific capital with a second sector producing firm-specific capital by adapting raw capital purchased in the market. Analysts rarely observe each sector separately....

We present several empirical facts about trends in marketing investment in the US. We also present estimates of the private value of brands to firms and aggregate intangible brand capital stocks created by these investments. These investments include the creation and maintenance of a brand name...

We introduce a model of oligopoly dynamic pricing where firms with limited capacity face a sales deadline. We establish conditions under which the equilibrium is unique and converges to a system of differential equations. Using unique and comprehensive pricing and bookings data for competing...

We show that supply networks are inefficiently, and insufficiently, resilient. Upstream firms can expand their production capacity to hedge against supply and demand shocks. But the social benefits of such investments are not internalized due to market power and market incompleteness. Upstream...

During project development, costs are endogenously determined through delegated bargaining with counterparties. In surveys, nearly 80% of CFOs report using an elevated hurdle rate, the implications of which we explore in a delegated bargaining model. We show that elevated hurdle rates can convey...

This paper studies contracting between a principal and multiple agents. The setup is classical except for the assumption that agents have interdependent preferences. We characterize cost effective contracts, and relate the direction of co-movement in rewards -- "joint liability" (positive) or...

We develop a dynamic model of firm investment under uncertainty that captures firms' risk attitude using quantile preferences. The firm maximizes its present value, defined as current profits and investment plus the discounted value of the τ-quantile of its value next period. In our framework,...

Industries with significant scale economies or learning-by-doing may come to be dominated by a single firm. Economists have studied how likely this is to happen, and whether it is efficient, using models where buyers are price or quantity takers, even though these industries are often also...