We use a simple model of collaborative innovation to structure an empirical analysis of minority equity links in biotechnology alliances between clients and R&D firms. In the model, an equity link is an investment in information acquisition: it improves the ability of the client to learn about...

The idea that profit sharing increases employment has been widely tested, but the theoretical basis for the claim is weak and the empirical results are ambiguous. This paper shows that employee stock ownership based on individually-held stakes avoids the problems of traditional profit sharing....

We construct a simple firm-based automata model for global economic inter-dependence of countries using modern notions of self-organized criticality and recently developed dynamical-renormalization-group methods (e.g., L. Pietronero et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 72(11):1690 (1994); J. Hasty and K....

One does not read very far into Smith's work without encountering apparent inconsistencies. Perhaps the most troubling arise in the discussion of the corn trade, where, contrary to his well-known principle that trade protection and subsidies draw to the favored industry "a greater share of the...

In signaling environments ranging from consumption to education, high quality senders often shun the standard signals that should separate them from lower quality senders. We find that allowing for additional, noisy information on sender quality permits equilibria where medium types signal to...

Managers would like to understand which strategies generate value in e-commerce environments, and researchers are just beginning to explore this issue. Which strategies are useful and which are not? In a step towards answering this question, we estimate the impacts of several competitive...

Using quantile regressions, this paper provides evidence that the relationship between school quality and wages varies across points in the conditional wage distribution and educational attainment levels. Although smaller classes generally have a positive return for individuals at high...

Building on a model that integrates reforms into exogenous and endogenous growth models, this paper designs an econometric model of the interplay between economic reform measures, political decisions and economic performance. Several key hypotheses about transition are tested using two-stage...

The current literature on sharing contracts emphasizes the importance of asymmetric information and typically assumes that one party is risk neutral while the other is risk averse. This paper describes a real-world contract that is widely used - the movie exhibition contract - and argues that...