I survey the influence of Grossman and Hart's (1986) “The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration,†94 Journal of Political Economy 691–719.) seminal paper in the field of International Trade. I discuss the implementation of the theory in...

We use a French firm-level data set containing 13,000 firms over the period 1994–2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms’ R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) R&D investment is countercyclical without...

Why do indemnity insurance plans cost substantially more per capita—77% more in our study—than HMOs? We answer this question using data from a large organization’s insurance pool, covering 215,000 lives. We decompose cost differences for eight major medical conditions into...

For-profit, or proprietary, colleges are the fastest-growing postsecondary schools in the nation, enrolling a disproportionately high share of disadvantaged and minority students and those ill-prepared for college. Because these schools, many of them big national chains, derive most of their...

This paper explores the link between employee perceptions of working conditions and the desire for worker representation in Britain and the US. We find that the distribution of employee perceptions of poor working conditions is similar in Britain and the US; similar factors affect the number of...

The repeated Prisoner's Dilemma is usually known as a story of tit-for-tat (TFT). This remarkable strategy has won both of Robert Axelrod's tournaments. TFT does whatever the opponent has done in the previous round. It will cooperate if the opponent has cooperated, and it will defect if the...

We derive a simplified version of the model of Fudenberg and Levine, 2006 and Fudenberg and Levine, 2011 and show how this approximate model is useful in explaining choice under risk. We show that in the simple case of three outcomes, the model can generate indifference curves that “fan...

This paper presents a simple model of currency crises which is driven by the interplay between the credit constraints of private domestic firms and the existence of nominal price rigidities. The possibility of multiple equilibria, including a ‘currency crisis’ equilibrium with low...

The theory of learning in games studies how, which and what kind of equilibria might arise as a consequence of a long-run non-equilibrium process of learning, adaptation and/or imitation. If agents’ strategies are completely observed at the end of each round, and agents are randomly...

We estimate discount rates of 555 subjects using a laboratory task and find that these individual discount rates predict inter-individual variation in field behaviors (e.g., exercise, BMI, smoking). The correlation between the discount rate and each field behavior is small: none exceeds 0.28 and...