Almost all recent US firm commitment IPOs between $20 million and $80 million in proceeds have been charged an underwriting spread of exactly 7%, while in the early 1980s only 25% of IPOs faced such clustering at exactly 7% [Chen and Ritter (2000)]. Such clustering, or specifically, the apparent...

Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, in their recent paper on file-sharing, provide numerous additional tests and facts to support their overall conclusion that file-sharing has a benign impact on record sales. In this note I attempt to replicate their additional tests and check their...

quot;Taking Stockquot; explores the place of newspaper journalism in the publicly traded newspaper companies. It does so through an analysis at the level of the firm and the organization of the publicly held business entity and its subsidiaries, analyzing financial operations, organization and...

Through a stroke of luck, a referee report in the review process at the JPE has been positively identified as the Oberholzer-Gee/Strumpf (O/S) response to my earlier comment. Regardless of the response's provenance, what counts is whether it solidly refuted my comment. This 'sequel' analyzes the...

To the uninitiated, transaction costs are often mysterious at best and dubious at worst. Even among economists who use the term often, there are misunderstandings as to what transaction costs actually are. I argue that much of the transaction cost "image" is caused by the lack of a workable...

This chapter addresses the history, use and significance of the term transaction costs. Few words in the economic language have been more abused or fought over and this is shown to result from the emergence of two distinct definitions and uses. The ‘Neoclassical’ definition rests on the...

In standard models of contracts, efficient incentives require the promisor to pay damages for non-performance and the promisee to receive no damages. To give efficient incentives to both parties, we propose a novel contract requiring the promisor to pay damages for nonperformance to a third...

We explore conditions under which collaboration between pharmaceutical firms from 'advanced' and emerging countries becomes preferable to rivalry. We show that that when agreements, such as Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (IP) Rights, allow advanced country firms to take legal...

This is a lengthy critique of the empirical findings, factual claims, and logic of the empirical examination of file-sharing by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf. It is written for a general audience and provides details of calculations, data, and industry measurements that allow...

This paper is an analysis of the economics underlying the Betamax case. It was written in 1985 but never published. With the renewed interest in copying and copyright in recent years, and because it has been cited and appeared on some reading lists, I thought it might be useful to make it available