We provide a business cycle model in which endogenous markup fluctuations are the main driving force. These fluctuations occur due to some form of ‘animal spirits’, impelling firms in their entry-exit decisions within each sector. By contrast to existing models of the business cycle emphasizing the role of animal spirits, we do not rely on the sink property of the equilibrium to generate indete...

Energy costs are notoriously uncertain but what is the effect of this on energysaving investments? We find that real-option frictions imply a novel equilibrium response to increasing but uncertain energy costs: early investments are cautious but ultimately real-option frictions endogenously vanish, and the activity affected by higher energy costs fully recovers. We use electricity market data f...

Article history: Received 30 September 2010 Received in revised form 18 September 2011 Accepted 18 September 2011 Available online 24 September 2011 This paper presents a few stylized facts on the patterns of China's industrialization by computing a set of multi-dimensional measures on industrial concentration, regional specialization, and clustering based on census data at the firm level in 19...

We compare the private and social incentives for privacy when sellers can commit to transparent privacy policies that are understood by consumers. The purpose is to establish a baseline for how well markets perform when firms’ privacy policies are common knowledge. In this setting, if the market is competitive, the outcome is first best or firms provide too much privacy. For monopolized markets...

Financing through crowdfunding is growing rapidly, especially for start-ups. Investment financing via crowdfunding is integrated with the real side of the firm as future consumers may potentially provide all or part of the required resources. We derive the optimal pre-sale crowdfunding contract of a financially constrained monopolist and analyze its implications for production, investment and w...

This paper addresses the question of whether existing institutional di erences in banking systems a ect bank competition in capital markets. Post-deregulation competition between entrant commercial banks and incumbent investment banks in the Japanese corporate bond underwriting market is empirically analyzed and compared with the results of the U.S. study in (Yasuda 2001b). I nd that the certi ...

The organizational form of franchising has been shown to yield higher profits and faster growth through reducing agency costs. Why then does anyone not franchise? In this paper I argue that the diffuse residual claims of the franchise system reduce overall system quality, and that this problem is inherent in the nature of franchising. The theory is tested by examining evidence from both the res...

We analyze a simple dynamic durable good oligopoly model where sellers are capacity constrained. Two incumbent sellers and potential entrants choose their capacities at the start of the game. We solve for equilibrium capacity choices and the (necessarily mixed) pricing strategies. In equilibrium, the buyer splits the order with positive probability to preserve competition; thus it is possible t...

We study a Bertrand game where two sellers supplying products of different and unverifiable qualities can outwit potential clients through their (costly) deceptive advertising. We characterize a class of pooling equilibria where sellers post the same price regardless of their quality and low quality ones deceive buyers. Although in these equilibria low quality goods are purchased with positive ...

Intermediaries can choose between functioning as a marketplace (on which suppliers sell their products directly to buyers) or as a reseller (purchasing products from suppliers and selling them to buyers). We model this as a choice between whether control rights over a non-contractible decision variable (the level of marketing activities) are better held by suppliers (the marketplace-mode) or by...