Short-term increasing returns to production factors are usually found in empirical studies. We argue they can be due to omitted variables, particularly the intensity of factor utilization. Thanks to original French firm-level data (1992–2008), we show how increasing returns to scale...

We identify cyclical turning points for 74 U.S. manufacturing industries and uncover new empirical regularities: (a) industries tend to comove between expansion and contraction phases over the business cycle; (b) clusters of industry turning points are highly asymmetric between peaks and troughs:...

Though common stocks are one of the most important assets in an economy, little is known about their demand curves. I estimate demand curves for 144 NYSE stocks using a unique data set of all orders, including off-equilibrium orders, during three months in 1990 and 1991. Connecting asset pricing...

This paper evaluates the efficacy of a structural model of oligopoly used for merger review. Using premerger data, we estimate several demand systems and use a static Bertrand model to simulate the price effects of two mergers. Using pre- and postmerger data, we directly estimate the price...

Two of the most robust results from dynamic competitive models of industrial organization suggest that higher-sunk-cost industries should exhibit higher intertemporal variability in the market value of their firms and lower intertemporal variability in the size of their industries. These...

Despite the prevalence of R&D support programs, evaluation studies based on explicit differences in support allocation are rare. In this paper, the identification of the causal effect of R&D support on company performance is based on geographic variation in government funding arising from a...

We derive testable implications of instrument validity in just identified treatment effect models with endogeneity and consider several tests. The identifying assumptions of the local average treatment effect allow us to both point identify and bound the mean potential outcomes of the always...

Suppose that all people in the world are allocated only two characteristics over which they have (almost) no control: country of residence and income distribution within that country. Assume further that there is no migration. We show that more than one-half of variability in income of world...

We estimate the impact of incentive strength on achievement under a group-based teacher incentive pay program. The system provides variation in the share of students in a subject-grade that a teacher instructs, which proxies for incentive strength. We find that achievement on incentivized exams,...

Standard job search theory assumes that unemployed individuals have perfect information about the effect of their search effort on the job offer arrival rate. We present an alternative model that assumes that each individual has a subjective belief about the impact of her search effort on the...