A large body of empirical work documents that prices of traded goods change by a smaller proportion than real exchange rates between the trading countries (incomplete pass-through). The wedge between exchange rates and relative prices also varies across countries (pricing-tomarket). I present a model of trade and international price-setting with heterogeneous firms, where firms’ strategic behav...

In this paper, we examine the impact of customer relationship management (CRM) on firm performance using a hierarchical construct model. Following the resource-based view of the firm, strategic CRM is conceptualized as an endogenously determined function of the organization’s ability to harness and orchestrate lower order capabilities that comprise physical assets, such as IT infrastructure, an...

This paper examines firms and the products they manufacture — and abandon — over time. We find strong relationships between product switching and a number of microand macroeconomic variables, including firm performance, aggregate manufacturing growth and product diversification. Most importantly, product switching is a very important — and active — margin of firm adjustment that is positively c...

A major challenge in single particle reconstruction methods using cryo-electron microscopy is to attain a resolution sufficient to interpret fine details in three-dimensional (3D) macromolecular structures. Obtaining high resolution 3D reconstructions is difficult due to unknown orientations and positions of the imaged particles, possible incomplete coverage of the viewing directions, high leve...

Though they developed in isolation, the theory of entrepreneurship and the economic theory of the firm can be usefully integrated. In particular, the concept of entrepreneurship as judgment associated with Knight (1921) and some Austrian school economists aligns naturally with the theory of the firm. Because judgment cannot be purchased on the market, the entrepreneur needs a firm — a set of al...

Building on the resource-based view of the firm, we advance the idea that a firm’s customer network can be a strategic asset. We suggest that network effects are a function of network size (i.e., installed customer base) and network strength (i.e., the marginal impact of a unit increase in network size on demand). We empirically study these network effects in the 16bit home video game industry ...

This essay seeks to give a contractarian foundation to the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), meant as an extended model of corporate governance of the firm. It focuses on justification according to the contractarian point of view (leaving compliance and implementation problems to a related article, [Sacconi 2004b, forthcoming in the Journal of Business Ethics]). It begins by pro...

This paper examines the dividend and investment policies of a cash constrained firm, assuming a decreasing-returns-to-scale technology and adjustment costs. We extend the literature by allowing the firm to draw on a secured credit line both to hedge against cash-flow shortfalls and to invest/disinvest in productive assets. We formulate this problem as a bi-dimensional singular control problem a...

We study incentives for skill acquisition when skills cannot be contracted on. Our framework has two features. First, workers can acquire both firm specific and general skills at a cost, and second, job assignments signal skill acquisition to a less informed labor market. Our key insight is that each skill performs a different function. The firm specific skill helps in revealing information to ...