New entrants very often spin out from established firms and because they set on a course at founding, their learning and capabilities become inextricably linked to their organizational and technological heritage. But while this heritage may provide an initial advantage, it can also generate...

Using a long-panel dataset of Japanese firms that contains firm-level sales forecasts, we provide evidence on firm-level uncertainty and imperfect information over their life cycle. We find that firms make non-negligible and positively correlated forecast errors. However, they make more precise...

Two ubiquitous empirical regularities in pay distributions are that the variance of wages increases with experience, and innovations in wage residuals have a large, unpredictable component. The leading explanations for these patterns are that over time, either firms learn about worker...

Employer learning about workers' abilities plays a key role in determining how workers sort into jobs and are compensated. This study explores whether learning is symmetric or asymmetric, i.e., whether potential employers have the same information about worker ability as the incumbent firm. I...

I develop and estimate a model of export dynamics featuring self-discovery that accounts well for new exporter dynamics: (a) continuation rates that are increasing with tenure, and (b) growth rates of export sales that are decreasing with tenure. The option value generated by the acquisition of...

A monopolist uses prices as an instrument to influence consumers' belief about the unknown quality of its product. Consumers observe prices and sales in earlier periods to learn about the product. Every period they decide whether to consume the product or to wait for a lower price in future. We...

We study relational contracts in a firm-worker relationship with mutual uncertainty about match quality. The worker's actions are publicly observed and generate output, and hence information about the match quality. Despite the absence of private information, uncertainty about match quality...

Do firms learn to forecast future business conditions after major structural changes to the economy? How long does it take? We exploit German Reunification as a natural experiment, where firms in the East are treated with ignorance about the distribution of market states, to test a Bayesian...

We analyse the dynamics resulting from social learning in a simple general equilibrium (GE) model, whose structure is similar to the one underlying macroeconomic models of the New Macroeconomic Synthesis. The economy is composed by households and firms who exchange labour and consumption goods...

I study a monopolistic pricing problem in which the consumer performs product research to determine whether or not to purchase a good. The consumer receives a signal of quality via a Brownian motion process with a type-dependent drift. I fully characterize the consumer's optimal strategy; she...