Under what conditions does cost-of-service regulation lead firms to distort costs? This paper analyzes changes in fuel procurement practices by coal- and natural gas-fired electricity generating plants in the United States following state-level legislation that ended cost-of-service regulation...

Is there a silver lining to Depression? This paper examines one instance where economic downturn appears to have given a permanent boost to productivity: the U.S. railroad industry during the Depression

Multiple dimensional shifts related to firm-level multinationalization spill over to the aggregate realm as an unusually large mass of US firms multinationalized in the late-1990s. Firms become considerably different in many aspects as they transform into multinational enterprises (MNEs),...

This paper describes the response of the economy to large shocks in a nonlinear production network. While arbitrary combinations of shocks can be studied, it focuses on a sector's tail centrality, which quantifies the effect of a large negative shock to the sector - a measure of the systemic...

Recent literature suggests that news shocks could be an important driver of economic cycles. In this article, we use a direct measure of news sentiment derived from media reports. This allows us to examine whether innovations in the reporting tone correlate with changes in the assessment and...

We provide a simple model to investigate decisions about vertical separation. The key feature of this model is that more than one input is required for the final product of the downstream monopolist. We show that as the bargaining powers of independent complementary input suppliers grow larger,...

Radio spectrum is a vital asset and resource for mobile network operators. With spectrum in the 800 and 900 MHz bands coverage can be provided with fewer base station sites compared to higher frequency bands like 2.1 and 2.6 GHz. With more spectrum, i.e. wider bandwidth, operators can offer...

Multinational corporations (MNCs) have benefited tremendously from free trade in the past few decades in the form of cost reductions, resource advantages, and market expansion. However, the dynamism of international relations and a global recession have rekindled the debate over frictionless...

What explains record U.S. house price growth since late 2019? We show that the shift to remote work explains over one half of the 23.8 percent national house price increase over this period. Using variation in remote work exposure across U.S. metropolitan areas we estimate that an additional...

This paper investigates the relationship between contract manufacturing and quality risk — a term defined as the propensity of a manufacturing plant to operate out of compliance with required procedures. Contract manufacturing plants (hereafter, CM) are increasingly being used in many...