We investigate the impact of alternative certifying institutions on firms' incentives to engage in costly Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities as well as their relative market and societal implications. We find that the CSR certification standard is the lowest under for-profit...

We study vertical integration incorporating the fact that it creates the possibility of knowledge disclosure. We consider a setting where, through integrating, an upstream monopolist learns its downstream partner’s innovation, and can disclose it to its downstream rival. We show that a...

This paper studies the innovation dynamics of an oligopolistic industry. The firms compete not only in the output market but also by engaging in productivity enhancing innovations to reduce labor costs. Rent sharing may generate productivity dependent wage differentials. Productivity growth...

The paper explores the political economy of the "minimum-wage institution (MWI)" in an internationally integrated product market. The authors consider a two-sector Economic Union (EU) with a perfectly competitive agricultural sector and a unionized oligopolistic manufacturing sector in which...

This paper studies a strategic aspect of profit-sharing in an oligopolistic industry with a monopoly union. Whenever a uniform profit share exists in the industry, we show that a union that values the per worker remuneration positively, may have incentives to reduce industry employment,...

We demonstrate the possibility of shake-out of firms and emergence of inter-firmheterogeneity along the (socially optimal) dynamic equilibrium path of a competitive industry with freeentry and exit, even when there is no uncertainty and all firms are ex ante identical with perfectforesight....

We study competing vertical chains where upstream and downstream firms bargain over their form and terms of trading. Both (conditionally) inefficient wholesale price contracts and efficient contracts that take the form of price-quantity bundles (and not of two-tariffs) arise in equilibrium under...