Oliver E. Williamson is the 2009 co-recipient (with Elinor Ostrom) of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, awarded ‘for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm’.

To what extent do environmental regulations affect trade flows? Early cross-sectional studies of the relationship generally found little effect. More recent research that controls for industry heterogeneity, the endogeneity of trade policy, and the type of trade and industry has found sizeable,...

Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) have been measuring the credit risk of debt for slightly over 100 years. The industry is characterised by artificial and natural barriers to entry and an issuer-pays system. The agencies’ ratings performed poorly for structured finance products and have been...

This entry describes the economics of foreclosure with respect to US residential mortgage markets from the perspective of both the borrower and the lender.

Households in the United States and a number of other wealthy nations have been migrating to places with nice weather. This likely reflects an increase in the relative valuation of the weather's direct contribution to household utility. Several different amenity explanations are discussed that...

Three key features of the retail trade for illicit drugs are documented: moral hazard, repeated interactions and price dispersion. An interpretation of this evidence based on search and informational frictions is presented. Various policy implications of the suggested interpretation are discussed.

In a social network, agents have their own reference group which may influence their behaviour. In turn, the agents' attributes and their behaviour affect the formation and the structure of the social network. This paper surveys the econometric literature on both aspects of social networks, and...

Currencies can be under severe pressure in the foreign exchange market, but in a fixed (or managed) exchange rate regime that is not fully visible via the change in the exchange rate. Exchange market pressure (EMP) is a concept developed to nevertheless measure the pressure in such cases. This...

Multiplicity of equilibria implies that the relationship between the outcome variable and the exogenous variables characterising a model is a correspondence rather than a function. This results in an incomplete econometric model. Incompleteness complicates identification and statistical...

Theory is divided over the effects of corruption on economic growth. However, the growing consensus based on the empirical literature is that corruption is associated with negative growth outcomes. This relationship is not necessarily linear, and causality between corruption and economic growth...