This work is a PhD dissertation, written at the Department of Economics, McGill University. The thesis offers a new framework for inflation as a process of restructuring. Contrary to existing theories of inflation, which tend to take structure and institutions as given for the purpose of...

We propose two perspectives on U.S. manufacturing job losses to countries in Asia in 1990-2011: production cost arbitrage and the management of supply-demand mismatch. In our model, a firm facing demand uncertainty decides between investing in domestic or overseas production capacity. The model...

The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’ The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In...

Mutual fund investors are supposed to make long-term investments instead of striving for quick fortunes. However, the dynamics of funds' ability to generate abnormal returns over their lifetime is still an unattended issue. This paper provides evidence on the liability of newness and liability...

This paper aims to reconcile the logic behind stochastic models of firm growth and the notion of organizational capabilities as drivers of economic performance. In the proposed behavioral model of bounded rational firms, two mechanisms drive growth: independent stochastic growth of individual...

What type of businesses do unions target for organizing? A dynamic model of the union organizing process is constructed to answer this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity and decides which ones to organize and when. An establishment becomes...

This paper is an empirical test of the hypothesis that the appropriateness of different business strategies is conditional on the firm's distance to the industry frontier. We use data on four 2-digit high-tech manufacturing industries in the US over the period 1972-1999, and apply...

What type of businesses attract unions? A theory of union learning and organizing is developed to provide an answer to this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity and decides which ones to organize. An establishment becomes unionized if the...