Economic Governance: Law, Markets, and Organizations

Kathryn Spier

Kathryn E. Spier is the Domenico De Sole Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School and President Emeritus of the American Law and Economics Association.  She received her PhD from MIT in 1989, and her BA in mathematics and economics from Yale in 1985. Before joining the Harvard Law School in 2007, she was for 13 years a professor in the Management and Strategy department at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and served as the Richard M. Paget Distinguished Professor. Before that, she served as assistant and associate professor in the Harvard Economics Department. Professor Spier is currently serving as a co-editor of the RAND Journal of Economics, an associate editor of the American Economic Review, and is a Research Associate in the Law and Economics Group of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has published extensively in the areas of law and economics and industrial organization. Her areas of interest include the economics of litigation, contracts, tort law, antitrust, and business organization.  Professor Spier’s current research on contracts and bargaining is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Research Interest :

• Law and Economics
• Corporate Law: Industrial Organization
• Business Organizations and Law

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Settling Lawsuits with Pirates

(joint work with Xinyu Hua) 

A firm licenses a product to overlapping generations of heterogeneous consumers. Consumers may purchase the product, pirate/steal it, or forego it. Higher consumer types enjoy higher gross benefits and are caught stealing at a higher rate. The firm may commit to an out-of-court cash settlement policy that is “soft” on pirates, so high-types purchase and low-types steal. This facilitates price discrimination. Firm profits rise if the firm bundles a license agreement with the cash settlement. However, requiring pirates to sign license agreements as part of the settlement has ambiguous welfare effects and may deter the entry of more efficient competitors.

Jens Prüfer

Jens Prüfer is Associate Professor of Economics at Tilburg University and a member of the Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC). His research focuses on institutional and organizational questions, applying economic methodology to a broad set of disciplines, including law, management, political science, history, religious studies, and computer science. He studied Economics and Chinese studies in Tübingen (Germany) and Singapore and holds a PhD in Economics from Goethe University Frankfurt.

Clash of Classification Institutions

Andy Newman

Professor of Economics at Boston University and a Research Fellow of the CEPR in London. 

Before arriving at BU, He was Professor of Economics at University College London. Prior to that, he held posts at Columbia and  Northwestern and visiting positions at Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, Yale and Harvard.

Research Interest :

• economic theory, especially as applied to understanding organizations, economic development, and income distribution.

Competing for the  Quiet Life:  An Organizational Theory of Market Structure

Andy Newman  (with Patrick Legros and Zsolt Udvari)

We develop an incomplete-contracts  model of endogenous  market structure for a homogeneous-good industry. Production is carried out by identical, incentive-constrained  teams that may remain alone  as price-taking competitors, or horizontally integrate with other teams by selling out to profit-motivated  HQs that  Cournot compete in the product market. Despite a lack of large technological non-convexities, the equilibrium market structure is typically an oligopoly; thus, contracting imperfections are an independent source of market power. A fundamental hold-out problem governs market structure, placing upper and lower bounds on concentration. Unlike in the standard Cournot-entry model, concentration may increase with the size of the market,  suggesting a possible demand-side driver of recent trends. Implications for competition policy and the IO of developing countries are discussed.

Keywords: Horizontal integration; incomplete contracts;  theory of the firm; property rights; global market power; hold-out; merger paradox; OIO; coalition formation

Maitreesh Ghatak

Maitreesh Ghatak is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, a position he has held since 2004. He is an elected Fellow of the British Academy.  He previously taught at the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.  His main areas of research interest are development economics, public economics, and the economics of organizations. He served as the Deputy Head of the Department of Economics from 2016-19.  He has been the Director of the Development Economics Group at the research centre STICERD at the LSE since 2005. He completed his PhD in Economics at Harvard University in 1996 under the supervision of Eric Maskin and Abhijit V. Banerjee.  Earlier, he did his undergraduate degree in Economics at Presidency College, Calcutta and his Master’s in Economics at the Delhi School of Economics. He is a co-editor of Economica starting 2016, having previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Development Economics from 2009-2015, the Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies from 2003-2006, and a co-editor of The Economics of Transition from 2003-2005. He is also in the editorial board of several journals. He is a Board Member of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD); Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in three research areas: Development Economics (DE), Macroeconomics and Growth (MG), and Public Economics (PE); he has served as the Lead Academic of the International Growth Centre’s (IGC) India–Bihar programme and as an external member of the Research Committee of The World Bank. He is a founding member of several research networks: Theoretical Research in Development (ThReD), Economics of Social Sector Organisations (ESSO), and Non-profits, Governments, and Organizations (NGO).  He writes occasionally on economic, political and policy issues for a broader audience with a special focus on India in various newspapers, magazines, and blogs. 

Can Discriminatory Behaviours Persist in Competitive Labour Markets?   

(joint work with Zaki Wahhaj, U of Kent)

Gani Aldashev

Professor of Economics, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), ECARES, and SBS-EM

The Multitasking Dean: University Financing and the Future of the Research University