Over the last few decades, researchers have taken a thorough and critical look at corporate governance from various perspectives. For the most part, they have found that structural features of corporate governance have little or no relation to governance quality. For example, there is no...

What can be learned about marketing phenomena from descriptive, structural, and experimental empirical models? Is structure implicit in a descriptive empirical model? What is a "reduced-form model?" What is a natural experiment, and what can one infer from a study that uses experimental data?...

Many provisions of the U.S. tax code affect corporate decisions to pay out or retain earnings. Most studies of these effects have examined the effects of dividend and capital gains taxes on payouts. Relatively few studies have considered the effects of corporate taxes on retentions. In the early...

This paper studies the investment activities of 44 independent oil and gas firms from 1978 to 1986. It develops a dynamic model of oil and gas exploration and development. The model predicts less of a decline in exploration activity than actually occurred in 1985-86. I consider the extent to...

This paper devises new methods for measuring firms' sunk costs and their effect on market structure. It builds on our earlier work that estimated the size of unobserved fixed costs from entry thresholds, the amount of market demand necessary to support a new entrant. Here we show that...

This paper examines how to evaluate consumer welfare when consumers face nonlinear prices. This problem arises in many settings, such as devising optimal pricing strategies for firms, assessing how price discrimination affects consumers, and evaluating the efficiency costs of many transfer...