We investigate whether labor unionization of customer firms affects the operating performance of their dependent suppliers. Using a sample of U.S. union elections, our regression discontinuity tests show that passing a union election leads to a 6.9 percentage-point decline in supplier operating...

It is a popular practice for firms to acquire a block share of their manufacturers' ownership. This paper studies the economic impacts of such partial vertical ownership (PVO) in the presence of downstream market competition. Prior studies of vertical integration suggest that firms benefit from...

Firms enjoy declining cost per unit of output with increasing cumulative output in a variety of industries, which gives rise to consumer concerns about transaction fairness. Consumers are less likely to purchase from a firm if it continues to reap an unfairly high profit margin. Intuitively,...

Using data involving customer-supplier relationships and a large sample of U.S. publicly listed firms, our study documents a negative and statistically significant relationship between economic-policy uncertainty and firms’ customer-base concentration. The negative relation is predominant in...

We study the dynamics in a partnership between a university and a developing region. We examine how the university achieves its goals to improve and advertise its offerings while recruiting a cohort of students from the developing region, and maintaining a sustainable relationship with the...