This paper studies the competitive effects of vertical integration between pharmaceutical drug producers and distributors in an auction setting. Utilizing data on 814,000 public procurement auctions in Russia, I identify the causal effect of vertical integration on the procurement prices of...

The optimal duration of a supply contract balances the costs of re-selecting a supplier against the costs of being matched to an inefficient supplier when the contract lasts too long. I develop a structural model of contract duration that captures this tradeoff and provide an empirical strategy...

We study the incentives of firms that hold partial vertical ownership to foreclose rivals. Compared to a full vertical merger, with partial ownership, a firm may obtain only part of the target's profit but may nevertheless be able to influence the target's strategy significantly. The target may...

Vertical integration followed by quantity competition is studied. In the first stage of the game downstream firms simultaneously decide whether to integrate with one of the upstream suppliers. If firms are not able to observe whether their vertically integrated competitor enters the...

This paper analyzes the impact of vertical integration on product quality. Contrary to previous findings, it is shown that integration decreases quality in many natural situations. In general, the direction of the quality change is governed by three effects that are isolated in the model. This...

I provide a justification of intellectual property rights as a source of static efficiency gains in manufacturing, rather than dynamic benefits from greater innovation. I develop a property-rights model of a supply relationship with two dimensions of non- contractible investment. In equilibrium,...

We analyze the sourcing strategies of firms active in the Spanish manufacturing sector. We show that firms that select strategies of vertical integration and of foreign sourcing ex post tend to have been more productive, ex ante, than other firms.

We study how the vertical industry structure affects investment in network quality and social welfare, with a focus on the prospective deployment of high-speed broadband access networks (the so-called NGA). We model pros and cons of vertical separation, namely, pro-competitive effects and loss...

Understanding what determines firm boundaries and the choice between interacting in a firm or a market is not only the fundamental concern of the theory of the firm, but it is also one of the most important issues in economics. Data on value added, for example, reveal that in the US,...

In this paper we consider a market situation in which initially there is an unintegrated monopoly upstream that owns an essential facility and two downstream firms. Then the market is liberalized allowing upstream entry and vertical integration. The equilibrium entry mode--sharing the incumbent...