Journal of Political Economy

This paper argues that incumbent firms may acquire innovative targets solely to discontinue the target’s innovation projects and preempt future competition. We call such acquisitions “killer acquisitions.” We develop a model illustrating this phenomenon. Using pharmaceutical industry data, we show that acquired drug projects are less likely to be developed when they overlap with the acquirer’s existing product portfolio, especially when the acquirer’s market power is large because of weak competition or distant patent expiration. Conservative estimates indicate that 5.3%–7.4% of acquisitions in our sample are killer acquisitions. These acquisitions disproportionately occur just below thresholds for antitrust scrutiny.

We show that family background matters significantly for children’s accumulation of wealth and investor behavior as adults, even when removing the genetic connection between children and the parents raising them. The analysis is made possible by linking Korean-born children who were adopted at infancy by Norwegian parents to a population panel data set with detailed information on wealth and socioeconomic characteristics. The mechanism by which these Korean-Norwegian adoptees were assigned to adoptive families is known and effectively random. This mechanism allows us to estimate the causal effects from an adoptee being raised in one type of family versus another.

We extend the standard intergenerational mobility literature by examining the relationship between adult outcomes of children and the timing of parental income during their childhood years, using data from Norway. We find first that, conditional on permanent household income, the child’s human capital is higher in households where income is balanced between the early childhood and late childhood years than in households with a more imbalanced income profile. Second, compared to that in the early and late periods of childhood, income in the middle period has relatively low productivity.

We report a continuous-time experiment studying the Burdett-Judd model, whose unique Nash equilibrium (NE) features dispersed prices. Adaptive dynamics predict that the NE is stable for one of our parameter sets and unstable for another. The empirical price distribution is close to the NE distribution for the stable parameter set, but for the unstable parameter set it skews toward higher prices in its NE support interval. We offer an empirical definition of price cycles in terms of changes over time in robust measures of central tendency and dispersion, by which the data exhibit persistent cycles in both treatments but larger cycles for the unstable parameters. Results are roughly similar for professional and student sellers and for limited-information treatments.

This paper derives conditions under which preferences and technology are nonparametrically identified in hedonic equilibrium models. With products differentiated along a quality index and agents characterized by scalar unobserved heterogeneity, single-crossing conditions on preferences and technology provide identifying restrictions in previous work. We develop similar shape restrictions in the multiattribute case. These shape restrictions, based on optimal transport theory and generalized convexity, allow us to identify preferences for goods differentiated along multiple dimensions from the observation of a single market. We thereby derive identification results for nonseparable simultaneous equations and multiattribute hedonic equilibrium models with (possibly) multiple dimensions of unobserved heterogeneity. One of our results is a proof of absolute continuity of the distribution of endogenously traded qualities, which is of independent interest.

Large firms play a pivotal role in international trade. We develop a multisector granular model of trade where sectors host a finite number of firms. Both aggregate and granular firm-level forces shape comparative advantage. The model is estimated using French microdata on firm domestic and export sales. We find that granularity accounts for about 20% of the sectoral variation in export intensity and is more pronounced in highly export-intensive sectors. An extension to a dynamic environment with both idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks reveals that firm dynamics plays a central role in shaping comparative advantage reversals observed in the data.

I examine the distributional consequences of technological change in a framework that nests Roy’s () and Becker’s () classical models: workers self-select into two sectors and then match with heterogeneous firms within each sector. In this model, technological change can be decomposed into changes in (i) the degree to which sectors covet the same skill sets and (ii) the extent to which output varies with skill in each sector. By deriving monotone comparative statics results for each of these two types of changes, I am able to provide a comprehensive account of the distributional consequences of technological change.