Auction houses use both in-house and third-party guarantees for sellers who are concerned about the risk that not enough bidders will enter the auction for their works. Auction houses are compensated for guarantees by buyers’ commissions and successful sales after attracting important works of...

Second and 3rd degree price discrimination (PD) receive far more attention than 1st degree PD, i.e. person-specific pricing, because the latter requires previously unobtainable information on individuals’ willingness to pay. I show modern web behavior data reasonably predict Netflix...

We consider nonparametric identification and estimation in a nonseparable model where a continuous regressor of interest is a known, deterministic, but kinked function of an observed assignment variable. This design arises in many institutional settings where a policy variable (such as weekly...

An existing theoretical literature finds that frictionless resale markets cannot reduce profits of monopolist producers of perfectly durable goods. This paper starts by presenting logical arguments suggesting this finding does not hold for goods consumers tire of with use, implying the impact of...

While the original justification of the antidumping laws in the industrial economies was to protect domestic consumers against predation by foreign suppliers, by the early 1990s the laws and their use had evolved so much that the opposite concern arose. Rather than attacking anti-competitive...

This paper describes the structure and microeconomics of the foreign exchange market. It begins by outlining the major participants and the instruments they trade, highlighting the vast institutional changes that accompanied the emergence of electronic trading since the 1990s. It then discusses...

Using plant-level data from the manufacturing sector of Chile for the period 1990-2000, this paper examines the effect of financial development on the probability of exporting at the plant level, with a special focus on the heterogeneous responses of plants with different characteristics. The...

This paper develops an intra-industry trade model with skilled and unskilled labor as factors of production, endogenous accumulation of skilled labor and firm heterogeneity in factor intensities to examine the effect of trade reforms on factor prices. Since exporters are more skill intensive...

This paper investigates the information in corporate credit ratings. We examine the extent to which firms' credit ratings measure raw probability of default as opposed to systematic risk of default, a firm's tendency to default in bad times. We find that credit ratings are dominated as...

The half century leading up to the crisis of 2008-2009 was the best such period in world economic history, especially in the Asia Pacific. Peace and relative economic stability permitted unprecedented liberalization, economic integration, and advances in productivity and growth. But the...