This paper analyzes retailers’ adoption of e-commerce in a technology adoption race framework. An Internet-based firm with no traditional market presence competes with an established traditional firm to adopt the e-commerce technology and sell to a growing number of consumers with on-line...

This paper develops a dynamic industry model in which firms compete to acquire customers over time by disseminating information about themselves under the presence of random shocks to their efficiency. The properties of the model’s stationary equilibrium are related to empirical regularities...

This paper introduces a model to analyze the role of the cost of information dissemination in large markets where firms have varying degrees of intrinsic efficiency reflected in their marginal costs. Firms enter a market and discover how efficient they are. Those firms with high enough...

This paper analyzes the structure of retail markets by highlighting the differential pattern exhibited across local markets by two different types of firm organization: chain stores versus stand-alone stores. Data from retail alcoholic beverage industry in California suggest that the number of...

We provide a recent account of the diffusion of electronic business in the U.S. economy using new data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. We document the extent of the diffusion in three main sectors of the economy: retail, services, and manufacturing. For manufacturing, we also analyze plants'...

Compared with mature firms, young firms, most of which represent entrepreneurial activity, disproportionately hire younger, nonemployed individuals, and provide them with lower earnings. Furthermore, in recent years the number of young firms has been declining, along with their employment share,...

Union membership displayed a ∩-shaped pattern over the 20th century, while the distribution of income sketched a ∪. A model of unions is developed to analyze these phenomena. There is a distribution of firms in the economy. Firms hire capital, plus skilled and unskilled labor. Unionization...