While there is a vast body of research on the benefits of FDI in developing countries, whether and how the form of FDI matters have received limited attention. In this paper, we study the impact of FDI via quid pro quo (technology for market access) on facilitating knowledge spillover and...

Using a randomized experiment with an automobile manufacturing firm in China, we measure the effects of letting workers evaluate their managers on worker and firm outcomes. In the treatment teams, workers evaluate their supervisors monthly. We find that providing feedback leads to significant...

A central challenge in estimating the causal effect of TV advertising on demand is isolating quasi-random variation in advertising. Political advertising, which topped $14 billion in expenditures in 2016, has been proposed as a plausible source of such variation and thus a candidate for an...

The true net environmental benefit of an electric vehicle (EV) is measured relative to the vehicle that an EV buyer would have bought and driven had they not opted for an EV. This "counterfactual" vehicle cannot be observed, but its fuel economy can be estimated. We use quasi-experimental...

This paper investigates the joint effect of consumers' environmental concerns and product-market competition on firms' decisions whether to innovate "clean" or "dirty". We first develop a step-by-step innovation model to capture the basic intuition that socially responsible consumers induce...

Product-recall data and information on stock-price reactions to recalls are used to estimate the value of reputation in a model in which product quality is not contractible. A recall is the result of a product defect that signals low effort. The recall triggers a reduction in the firm's product...

This paper examines the impact of vertical integration on the dynamics of performance over the automobile product development lifecycle. Building on recent work in organizational economics and strategy, we evaluate the relationship between vertical integration and different performance margins....

This paper examines complementarity among vertical integration decisions in automobile product development. Though most research assumes that contracting choices are independent of each other, contracting complementarity arises when the returns to a single vertical integration decision are...

During the summer of 2005, the Big Three U.S. automobile manufacturers offered a customer promotion that allowed customers to buy new cars at the discounted price formerly offered only to employees. The initial months of the promotion were record sales months for each of the Big Three firms,...

We have assessed the determinants of the choice of integration, relational contracting (keiretsu sourcing) and market sourcing by seven Japanese automobile manufacturers (OEMs) with respect to 54 components in light of contract economics. Our major findings are the following. First, the...