General Motors' 1926 acquisition of Fisher Body has long served as a cornerstone of hold-up arguments for vertical integration. This paper utilizes primary historical evidence to make three related claims. First, it shows that GM's initial investment in Fisher occurred primarily to gain access...

Partial vertical integration of many food and agricultural industries, especially beef packers’ acquisition of slaughter cattle, increasingly raises competition and fairness issues for the non-integrated residual market. While market foreclosure may be a central antitrust concern with full...

This paper analyses a large upstream joint venture with divestiture in the French coffee market. Contrary to previous approaches used to study the effect of upstream divestiture on prices and economic welfare, we model the vertical market structure. First, we show that divestiture can lead to...

Using textual analysis of earnings conference calls, we quantify firms' supply chain risk and its sources. Our proxy for supply chain risk exhibits large cross-sectional and time-series variation that aligns with reasonable priors and is unprecedently high during the Covid-19 pandemic. In...

Vertical integration followed by quantity competition is studied. In the first stage of the game downstream firms simultaneously decide whether to integrate with one of the upstream suppliers. If firms are not able to observe whether their vertically integrated competitor enters the...

This paper derives a concentration measure for markets with multiple vertical segments. The measure is derived using a model of vertical contracting where upstream and downstream firms bargain bilaterally and may be integrated. The resulting vertical Hirschman-Herfindahl Index provides a measure...

Using textual analysis of earnings conference calls, we quantify firm level risk arising from the reliability of the supply chain from 2002 to 2020. Our proxy for perceived supply chain risk exhibits cross-sectional and time-series variation that aligns with reasonable priors and is...

This note is concerned with the e¤ects of joint ownership of complements when they are vertically differentiated. We provide strong arguments for the positive nature of network integration among firms, while showing at the same time that, in some circumstances, anti-competitive consequences can...

This paper analyzes a merger of large manufacturers with divestiture in the French coffee market. In contrast to previous approaches used to study the effects of upstream divestitures on prices and welfare, we model the vertical market structure. First, our results show that the standard policy...