Most prior event studies find that the announcement of a new alliance is accompanied by a positive stock market response for the partners. This result has usually been interpreted as evidence for the prevailing view that alliances are effective vehicles for partners to acquire or access new...

The contracting practices of franchisors outside their domestic market have received little attention in the empirical literature on franchising to date, largely because of lack of data. We exploit a novel data set that allows us to describe the contracts offered by a number of US and Canadian...

Drawing on the hostage model of Williamson (1983. "Credible Commitments: Using Hostages to Support Exchange." The American Economic Review 73: 519--540) and recent studies identifying equity affiliation as a robust hostage in the Japanese automotive industry, we examine the relationship between...