We provide a first empirical analysis of firm commitments to reduce their carbon emissions. A growing fraction of publicly traded companies around the world have already voluntarily made commitments to attain reductions in their emissions by a certain date or to reduce the emission intensity of...

In this paper, we develop a simple model of international outsourcing and apply it to processing trade in China. We observe China's processing exports broken down by who owns the plant and by who controls the inputs the plant processes. Multinational firms engaged in export processing in China...

The modem corporation is one of the most successful inventions in history, as evidenced by its widespread adoption and survival as a primary vehicle of capitalism over the past century. Economists, however, have only recently begun to understand the economic nature of the corporation. In the...

How well does the theory of the firm explain the choice between intrafirm and arms' length trade? This paper uses firm-level import data from France to look into this question. We find support for three key predictions of property-rights theories of the multinational firm. Intrafirm imports are...

We study the optimal output of a competitive firm under price uncertainty. Instead of assuming a risk-averse firm, we assume that the firm is regret-averse. We find that optimal output under uncertainty would be lower than under certainty. We also prove that optimal output could increase or...

While radical technological change is often characterized as hazardous, particularly to incumbents, incremental technological change has appeared to be immune from such risks. Little attention has been given to the possibility that under some circumstances incremental technological change can be...

Since Coase's (1937) pioneering article, the theory of the firm, especially in its neoclassical form, has developed tremendously. The criticisms leveled against it confirm its interest and usefulness - which is not to say that it cannot be improved upon or corrected in many respects. This...

This paper examines the interplay between the real and financial decisions of the competitive firm under output price uncertainty. The firm faces additional sources of uncertainty that are aggregated into a background risk. We show that the firm always chooses its optimal debt-equity ratio to...