We study a model of film production, distribution and consumption. The studio can release two goods, a theatrical and a video version, and has to decide on its versioning and sequencing strategy. In contrast with the previous literature, we allow for the possibility that consumers watch both...

This paper investigates whether the arrival of managers with export experience, i.e. experience acquired through participation in the export activity of previous employers, is related to firms' international trade status and to what extent this relationship is of a causal nature. We construct a...

In this paper we study how the introduction of the euro has affected corporate financing in Europe. We use firm level data from eleven euro-countries as well as from a control group of five other European countries spanning the years 1991-2006. We show that firms from euro-countries that...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer --- the seller --- follows from a non--trivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer--induced certification acts as an inspection device, whence...

In this article we quantify the aggregate, distributional and welfare consequences of investment expensing and progressivity in flat-tax reforms of the United States economy. We find that investment expensing as in the Hall and Rabushka type of reform brings about sizable output gains and a...

The current study finds that societies which historically engaged in plough agriculture today have lower fertility. We argue, and provide ethnographic evidence, that the finding is explained by the fact that with plough agriculture, children, like women, are relatively less useful in the field....

We examine trade credit links between firms as a channel of international return comovement. We model firms in different countries connected by trade credit links in segmented stock markets with asymmetrically informed investors. The model predicts that the cross-serial correlation of country...

We distinguish two types of debt crises: those that are the outcome of exogenous shocks (to productivity growth for instance) and those that are endogenously created, either by self-fulfilling panic in financial markets or by the reckless behavior of "Panglossian" borrowers. After Krugman, we...

We present an intertemporal consumption model of consumer investment in financial literacy. Consumers benefit from such investment because their stock of financial literacy allows them to increase the returns on their wealth. Since literacy depreciates over time and has a cost in terms of...

We develop entrepreneurship and institutional theory to explain variation in different types of entrepreneurship across individuals and institutional contexts. Our framework generates hypotheses about the negative impact of higher levels of corruption, weaker property rights and especially...