This paper explores the effect of the spread of supermarkets on the participation of suppliers in supermarket value chains in Botswana and South Africa. Using secondary data and in-depth interviews with key players in the value chain, the paper evaluates the buyer power of supermarkets evidenced...

Improving a company's bargaining position is often cited as a chief motivation to vertically integrate with suppliers. This paper expands on that view in building a new theory of vertical integration. In my model firms integrate to gain bargaining power against other suppliers in the production...

Market failures are resulting in network operators and device manufacturers not being incentivized to ensure improved cyber security practices in their operations. The result is a large global base of vulnerable computers, modems/routers and Internet of Things devices which can be manipulated by...

Using firm level panel data from the U.S., I explore the relationship between firm size and R&D productivity for two important and R&D-intensive industries: Semiconductors and Pharmaceuticals. I employ two measures of a firm's R&D performance: the number of citations received per patented...

Can an increasing importance of intangible capital explain increases in markups and profits? I use a heterogeneous firm model to show how intangible capital, characterized by fixed costs and uncertainty, is related to markups and profits at the industry level. The scalability and uncertainty...

IntroductionThe "revolving door" is a practice quite widely in use in the United States, in which heads of state agencies, after completing their bureaucratic terms, are entering the very sector they have regulated. This phenomenon is also frequent in France, where it is coined "pantouflage",...

This paper theoretically analyzes the role of reference prices on competition and welfare in a context of a circular city model with free entry and reference prices, in which paying market prices above a reference negatively affects the utility of consumers. Agents interact in a three-stage...

The formation of new firms is an important determinant of economic development and the industrial organization literature highlights agglomeration as one of the main factors affecting the formation and scale of operations of new firms. This paper is one of the first to use developing country...

This paper introduces a large-scale administrative panel data set on corporate bankruptcy in Germany that allows for an econometric analysis of involuntary exits where previous studies mixed voluntary and involuntary exits. Approximately 83 percent of all bankruptcies occur in plants with no...

Globalization has been identified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities and as the emergence of human capital as the new stakeholder of the firm. This paper surveys recent work which examines the role of trade integration for these changes in corporate organization. More...