Should employers pay their employees better? Although this question might appear provoking because lowering production costs remains a cornerstone of the contemporary economy, we present new evidence highlighting the benefits a company might reap by paying its employees better. We introduce an...

We study how the duration of paid parental leave affects the accumulation of cognitive skills among children. We use a reform which extended parental leave benefits from 12 to 15 months for Swedish children born after August 1988 to evaluate the effects of prolonged parental leave on children's...

Problem definition: We consider a monopolist firm selling products to strategic customers who may purchase more than one unit of the product. A key feature of multi-unit purchases is that customers do not value the additional purchases as highly as the first unit, implying the results of...

Used product collection is a business practice widely adopted by firms to pursue the substantial economic value of product remanufacturing and to comply with regulatory policies imposed by governments. This paper considers the optimal design of a manufacturer's collection policy to encourage...

This paper estimates the effects on earnings of lsquo;gap years' between high school and university enrollment. The effect is estimated by means of standard earnings functions augmented to account for gap years and a rich set of control variables using administrative Swedish data. We find that...

Problem definition: This paper studies a supply chain in which a manufacturer sells a product to consumers through a retailer. The retailer makes an endogenous demand improvement decision on whether or not to increase the potential market base, which is imperfectly observed by the manufacturer....

In this paper, we consider a supply chain with a manufacturer and two retailers who are contracted through wholesale prices or two-part tariffs. We depart from the existing literature by assuming that contract terms between the manufacturer and a retailer are not observed by the rival retailer....

We consider a retailer selling new products with a returns policy. After consumers purchase products and find them undesirable, they can either return the products to the retailer or resell them individually. Both the retailer and consumers incur transaction costs in resale. Anticipating that...

Opaque selling, in which a seller offers a menu of opaque products from a collection of physical products, has been shown to be an effective strategy to segment a market and improve the seller's profit. We study opaque selling with stochastic demand and fixed initial inventory, where we consider...

Collaborative crowdsourcing communities help firms obtain ideas generated by the public sector at a lower cost compared to those generated in-house. However, the growth of these communities has led to a large influx of ideas. This has made it difficult for firm experts to identify and evaluate...