This paper examines puzzling behavior in industries in which one firm is able to obtain a price premium and/or a dominant market share for a product which is identical to that of its rivals. It is shown that when there is learning by doing, economies of scale, network externalities, or...

We explain why European trucking carriers are much smaller and rely more heavily on owner-operators (as opposed to employee drivers) than their US counterparts. Our analysis begins by ruling out differences in technology as the source of those disparities and confirms that standard hypotheses in...

This paper examines changes in the organization of the Spanish cotton industry from 1720 to 1860 in its core region of Catalonia. As the Spanish cotton industry adopted the most modern technology and experienced the transition to the factory system, cotton spinning and weaving mills became...

The largest fresh meat brand names in Spain are analyzed here to study how quality is signaled in agribusiness and how the underlying quality -assurance organizations work. Results show, first, that organizational form varies according to the specialization of the brand name. Publicly-controlled...

On March 18th 2009, FED has made a move it haven’t done since 1960 (the so-called Operation Trust conceived by the Kennedy administration): it steped into the market in order to buy long term securities for an amount of some 1.25 trillion dollars. FED also announced a program to restart...

This working paper maps out the structure and value chains of the wind industry, analyzes the wind industry's increasing global integration via cross-border trade and investment flows, and offers recommendations to policymakers for the design of investment and trade policies to help realize wind...

When should expertise be shared in markets and when in firms? Knowledge exchanges in the market involve less information about the quality of the provider's expertise, but facilitate good utilization of experts' knowledge. In a firm, management holds soft information about individuals' expertise...