Well-functioning markets allocate assets to owners that improve firms' management and performance. We study the effects of ownership changes on coffee mills in Rwanda - an industry in which managing relationships with farmers and seasonal workers is important and that has seen many ownership...

Does emergency credit prevent long-term financial distress? We study the causal effects of government-provided recovery loans to small businesses following natural disasters. The rapid financial injection might enable viable firms to survive and grow or might hobble precarious firms with more...

China's admission into the WTO in 2001 heralded a new era of globalization, increasing both import competition in domestic markets and foreign opportunities for US firms. In the aggregate, the average annual profitability of US public firms during the post globalization period (2003-2019)...

We study the spatial expansion of banks in response to banking deregulation in the 1980s and 90s. During this period, large banks expanded rapidly, mostly by adding new branches in new locations, while many small banks exited. We document that large banks sorted into the densest markets, but...

Technological innovation in medical services can improve health, but its ability to reach patients often depends on price signals for downstream providers, which can also be discordant across production inputs. We examine such a context when Medicare sharply revises facility fees--while holding...

Business environments dominated by information flows and autonomous tasks, typical of knowledge-intensive industries, are likely to require enough social capital to be viable and productive. In this paper, we use new EUKLEMS-INTANProd industry-level data (Bontadini et al., 2023a) covering a...

The extent of voluntary cooperation in the presence of externalities is shown as an equilibrium outcome in the supply and demand framework. The analysis uses familiar ingredients to provide a new way of understanding the results of the extensive literature beginning with Buchanan, Coase, Ostrom,...

Why do establishments exhibit wide variation in their productivity and profitability? Can variation in returns to advertising help answer this question? We present results from a large field experiment on Facebook and Instagram that documents variance in advertisers' ability to generate returns...