State owned enterprises (SOEs) are a pervasive form of firms across most economies in Southeast Asia. Their historical origin, development, and performance are diverse but reflects political and economic development in each country. Conforming with predictions from economic literature, SOEs in...

In village economies, small firm owners facing idiosyncratic shocks adjust production by cutting spending and reducing employment. House-holds with whom they trade inputs and labor scale back their own businesses and reduce consumption. As effects reverberate through local economies, the...

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is built on a fundamentally different paradigm: rather than having to trust individuals and institutions, participants in DeFi potentially only have to trust computer code that is enforced by a decentralized network of computers. We examine a natural experiment that...

Families run a large fraction of business groups around the world. In this paper, we analyze how the structure of the families behind these business groups affects the groups' organization, governance and performance. To address this question, we constructed a unique data set of family trees and...

There are surprisingly few estimates of the effect of sales taxes on retail prices, especially at the firm level. Further, along both sides of a state border, a change in one state%u2019s sales tax can shed light on the nature of competition, as a subset of firms effectively experiences a change...

Despite the considerable attention paid to the theory of tax incidence, there are surprisingly few estimates of the pass-through rate of sales taxes on retail prices. This paper estimates the effect of a suspension and subsequent reinstatement of the gasoline sales tax in Illinois and Indiana on...

Some gasoline markets exhibit remarkable price cycles, where price spikes are followed by a string of small price declines until the next price spike. This pattern is predicted from a model of competition driven by Edgeworth cycles, as described by Maskin and Tirole. We extend the Maskin and...

Some gasoline markets exhibit remarkable price cycles, where price spikes are followed by a series of small price declines: a pattern consistent with a model of Edgeworth cycles described by Maskin and Tirole. We extend the model and empirically test its predictions with a new dataset of daily...

There are surprisingly few estimates of the effects of sales taxes on retail prices, especially at the firm level. We consider the temporary suspension, and subsequent reinstatement, of the gasoline sales tax in Illinois and Indiana following a price spike in 2000. Earlier laws set the timing of...

Fully implemented in Thailand in 2002, the Universal Health Care Coverage (UC) Program aimed to provide cheap access to health care services, for 30 baht (less than 1 U.S. dollar) per visit, to all uninsured Thais. In this paper, we studied the impact of the UC in Thailand on the demand for...