OF THE DISSERTATION INCOME DISTRIBUTION, INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT WITH HETEROGENEOUS FIRMS by Feifei Wang Florida International University, 2016 Miami, Florida Professor Kaz Miyagiwa, Major Professor This dissertation investigates the factors that firms take into consideration when they decide in which manner to expand internationally (i.e. foreign direct investment and...

Better-informed consumers may be treated preferentially by firms because their consumption serves as a quality signal for other customers. For normal goods this results in wealthy individuals being treated better than poor individuals. We investigate this phenomenon in an equilibrium model of social learning with heterogeneous consumers and firms that act strategically. Consumers search for hig...

We study a competitive labor market with imperfect information. In our basic model, the labor market consists of heterogeneous workers and ex ante identical firms who have imperfect information about workers’ productivities. Firms compete by posting wages each round to win the right to make job offers, and take turns to cherry-pick more productive workers. We also consider extensions of the mod...

This paper establishes a link between the extent of collective bargaining and the degree of productivity dispersion within an industry. In a unionised oligopoly model we show that for only small differences in productivity levels. a sector-union can design a collective wage contract that covers a wide range of heterogeneous firms. In sectors with higher productivity dispersion, an industry unio...

Evolutionary theory of business activity studies how firms are selected out of environments that they do not fit, but most existing work under-emphasizes the distinction between acquisition and dissolution as selection processes. We address this gap with a multi-level analysis that investigates how managerial and functional organizational capabilities affect whether struggling firms exit by acq...

This survey paper aims at critically discussing the recent literature on firm formation and survival and the growth of new-born firms. The basic purpose is to single out the microeconomic entrepreneurial foundations of industrial dynamics (entry and exit) and to characterise the founder’s ex-ante features in terms of likely ex-post business performance. The main conclusion is that entry of new ...

This paper studies how different unionisation structures affect firm productivity, firm performance, and consumer welfare in a monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms and free entry. While centralised bargaining induces tougher selection among heterogeneous producers and thus increases average productivity, firm-level bargaining allows less productive entrants to remain in the m...

Many online content providers aim to compensate for a loss in advertising revenues by charging consumers for access to content. However, such a choice is not straightforward because subscription fees typically deter customers and a resulting decline in viewership further reduces advertising revenues. This research examines whether firms that offer both free and paid content can benefit from adj...