The Review of Economic Studies is one of the core journals in economics. It is essential reading for economists, consistently ranking among the top five journals.

Industrial policies are widely used across the world. In practice, designing and implementing these policies is a complicated task. In this paper, we assess the long-term performance of different industrial policy instruments, which include production subsidies, investment subsidies, entry subsidies, and consolidation policies. To do so, we examine a recent industrial policy in China aiming to propel the country’s shipbuilding industry to the largest globally.

This paper studies the impact of the arbitrator selection process on consumer outcomes. Using data from consumer arbitration cases in the securities industry over the past two decades, where we observe detailed information on case characteristics, the randomly generated list of potential arbitrators presented to both parties, the selected arbitrator, and case outcomes, we establish several motivating facts. These facts suggest that firms hold an informational advantage over consumers in selecting arbitrators, resulting in industry-friendly arbitration outcomes.

We analyze the equilibrium effects of “bid shopping” – a contractor soliciting a subcontractor bid for part of a project prior to a procurement auction, then showing that bid to a competing subcontractor in an attempt to secure a lower price. Such conduct is widely criticized as unethical by professional organizations, and has been the target of legislation at both the federal and state level, but is widespread in procurement auctions in many places.

We develop a dynamic contracting theory of asset- and cash flow-based financing that demonstrates how firm, intermediary, and capital market characteristics jointly shape firms’ financing constraints. A firm with imperfect access to equity financing covers financing needs through costly sources: an intermediary and retained cash. The firm’s financing capacity is endogenously determined by either the liquidation value of assets (asset-based) or the intermediary’s going-concern valuation of the firm’s cash flows (cash flow-based).

Wealthy households disproportionately invest in equity, causing equity returns to generate large and persistent fluctuations in top wealth inequality. Motivated by this observation, I study the joint dynamics of asset prices and wealth inequality in a model where a subset of agents (“entrepreneurs”) hold levered positions on the economy. In the model, as in the data, the wealth distribution is stochastic and it exhibits a Pareto tail, with a tail index that depends on the logarithmic average return of top households.

Quality provision is often low in many developing markets, and firms commonly lack a reputation for quality. This paper examines this issue both theoretically and empirically in the context of retail watermelon markets in China. I first demonstrate the existence of significant asymmetric information on quality between sellers and buyers, as well as the absence of a quality premium at baseline. To explain this, I develop a theoretical model that highlights the role of consumer beliefs and costly signaling in influencing sellers’ reputation incentives.