This paper investigates a procurement relationship between a welfare-oriented government and a private supplier. The agents face several versions of the trading good which differ in quality and production costs, and the differences between those items are undescribable ex ante. In presence of...

We study the link between public enforcement of property rights, innovation investments, and economic growth in an endogenous growth framework with an expanding set of product varieties. We find that a government may assure positive equilibrium growth through public employment in the enforcement...

Conventional wisdom depicts corruption as a tax on incumbent firms. This paper challenges this view in two ways. First, by arguing that corruption matters not so much because of the value of the bribe ("tax"), but because of another less studied feature of corruption, namely bribe...

In an incomplete contracts model where there are otherwise no social motives for protection, we show that protection is socially beneficial when a buyer outsources customized inputs from a specialized domestic supplier while also purchasing generic inputs from the world market. The reason is...

This paper studies the welfare effect of product incompatibility in complementary goods markets. Complementary goods are often incompatible across brands. Incompatibility imposes a choice constraint and increases consumers' costs of switching or upgrading. Firms take advantage of incompatibility...

Ramanna (this issue) argues that the FASB’s new Conceptual Framework deemphasizes reliability in favor of representational faithfulness to facilitate the FASB’s promotion of an “asset-liability” approach measured at fair values. More importantly, Ramanna argues that this change is likely...

It is well-known that a seller imposed non-discrimination clause can soften downstream price competition by constraining opportunistic pricing behavior on the part of an upstream monopolist seller. But what about about market settings in which there exists a pivotal buyer? We show that in the...

We study the welfare impact of rules of origin in free trade agreements where final-good producers source customized inputs from suppliers within the trading bloc. We employ a property-rights framework that features hold-up problems in suppliers' decisions to invest, and where underinvestment is...