Based on data from a comprehensive benchmarking study on buyer-supplier relationships in the German automotive industry, we show that more trust in a relationship is associated with higher idiosyncratic investment by suppliers and better part quality - but also with more competition among...

We study how informal buyer-supplier relationships in the German automotive industry affect procurement. Using unique data from a survey focusing on these, we show that more trust, the belief that the trading partner acts to maintain the mutual relationship, is associated with both higher...

We investigate the role of mutual trust in long-term vertical relationships involving trades of complex goods. High complexity is associated with high contract incompleteness and hence the increased relevance of trust-based relational contracts. Contrary to expectations, we find that changes in...

This paper studies how firms' offshoring decisions shape a country's domestic production networks. We develop a model in which heterogeneous firms source inputs from multiple industries located in different domestic regions and foreign countries. Input sourcing entails communication with...

The recent literature on firm-to-firm trade has documented salient empirical regularities of the buyer-seller network. We propose a simplistic re-interpretation of the classical Krugman (1980) model that accounts for surprisingly many of the empirical regularities. This re-interpretation relies...

Firm-to-firm connections in domestic and international production networks play a fundamental role in economic outcomes. Firm heterogeneity and the sparse nature of firm-to-firm connections implicitly discipline network structure. We find that a large group of well-established statistical...

This paper explores why competing firms can choose to outsource to an external common supplier that does not have a cost advantage in input production. The supplier, through its contract offers, manages to generate asymmetry, to alter product market competition, and to extract profits from the...

We use unique plant-level data to study the link between the local availability of services and the decision of manufacturing firms to source materials from abroad. To guide our empirical analysis we develop a monopolistic-competition model of the materials sourcing decisions of heterogeneous...

In this paper, we consider a dynamic search-and-matching problem of a firm with its intermediate input supplier. In our model, a headquarter currently matched with a supplier, has an interest to find and collaborate with a more efficient partner. However, supplier switching through search and...

This paper explores how improved internet infrastructure impacts supply chains and economic activity, focusing on Türkiye. Using the expansion of fiber-optic networks and firm-to-firm transaction data, we find that better connectivity shifts input sourcing to well-connected regions and...