Issue 4

Volume 29 JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
Winter 2020

The impact of COVID‐19 on small business owners: Evidence from the first 3 months after widespread social‐distancing restrictions

Robert Fairlie
Social‐distancing restrictions and health‐ and economic‐driven demand shifts from COVID‐19 are expected to shutter many small businesses and entrepreneurial ventures, but there is very little early evidence on impacts. This paper provides the first analysis of impacts of the pandemic on the number of active small businesses in the United States using nationally representative data from the April 2020 Current Population Survey—the first month fully capturing early effects.

Innovation disclosure in times of uncertainty

Mario Daniele Amore
A recent literature shows that many firms feature missing R&D expenses in their accounting statements. This study explores how economic policy uncertainty affects the decision to disclose innovation‐related information.

An economic model of patent exhaustion

Olena Ivus, Edwin L.‐C. Lai, and Ted Sichelman
This paper offers the first economic model of domestic patent exhaustion that incorporates transaction costs in licensing downstream buyers and considers how the shift from absolute to presumptive exhaustion affects social welfare.

Resources and culture in organizations

Suraj Prasad and Marcus Tomaino
We look at how an organization's level of resources interacts with its culture—that is, its shared beliefs and preferences. We consider an organization where workers exert effort to develop projects.

Obstructive monitoring

Aaron Finkle and Dongsoo Shin
We consider a principal–agent relationship in which the principal's monitoring can be obstructive to the agent, reducing the agent's productivity. We show that, with obstructive monitoring, the optimal output schedule is distorted in all directions—the high‐cost agent produces less , and the low‐cost agent produces more than the first‐best levels.

Contracting under unverifiable monetary costs

Nicolas Quérou, Antoine Soubeyran, and Raphael Soubeyran
We consider a contracting relationship where the agent's effort induces monetary costs, and limits on the agent's resource restrict his capability to exert effort. We show that the principal finds it best to offer a sharing contract while providing the agent with an up‐front financial transfer only when the monetary cost is neither too low nor too high.

Collusion under different pricing schemes

Florian Gössl and Alexander Rasch
We analyze collusive outcomes under different pricing schemes in a differentiated product market in which customers have elastic demand.

Multiple‐quality Cournot oligopoly and the role of market size

Ngo Van Long and Zhuang Miao
We model an oligopoly where firms are allowed to freely enter and exit the market and choose the quality level of their products by incurring different setup costs. Using this framework, we study the mix of firms in the long‐run Cournot–Nash equilibrium under different cost structures and the effects of market size on market outcomes.