We organized business associations for the owner-managers of randomly selected young Chinese firms to study the effect of business networks on firm performance. We randomized 2,800 firms into small groups whose managers held monthly meetings for one year, and into a "no- meetings" control group....

We seed noisy information to members of a real-world social network to study how information diffusion and information aggregation jointly shape social learning. Our environment features substantial social learning. We show that learning occurs via diffusion which is highly imperfect: signals...

What is the effect of imports on productivity? To answer this question, we estimate a structural model of producers using product-level import data for a panel of Hungarian manufacturing firms from 1992 to 2001. In our model with heterogenous firms, producers choose to import or purchase...

We examine integration strategies of multinational firms that face a rich array of choices of international organization. Each firm in an industry must provide headquarter services from its home country, produce intermediate inputs, and assemble the intermediate goods into final products. Both...

Many households devote a large fraction of their budgets to "consumption commitments" -- goods that involve transaction costs and are infrequently adjusted. This paper characterizes risk preferences in an expected utility model with commitments. We show that commitments affect risk preferences...