THIS ARTICLE critically reviews the Handbook of Industrial Organization (henceforward the Handbook), edited by Richard Schmalensee and Robert Willig. These two volumes are the tenth installment in the North-Holland Handbooks in Economics series, under the general editorship of Kenneth Arrow and Michael Intriligator. Like its predecessors, this Handbook contains a number of survey papers (in this instance, 26) on a variety of related topics. As such, they afford both authors and readers an opportunity to determine which directions research in the field has taken, what (if any) real advances have been made, and what questions are still unanswered. Consequently, this review also describes and appraises the current state of Industrial Organization. Research in Industrial Organization has undergone a dramatic change in the last 20 years. Neoclassical decision-theoretic analysis and competitive general equilibrium theory have been supplanted almost completely by noncooperative game theory. This change was not merely the adoption of the tools of another field.

Conventional models of production under uncertainty specify that output is produced in fixed proportions across states of nature. I investigate a representation of technology that allows firms to transform output from one state to another. I allow the firm to choose the distribution of its random productivity from a convex set of such distributions described by a limit on a moment of productivity scaled by a natural productivity shock. The model produces a simple discount factor that is linked to productivity and that can be used to price a wide variety of assets, without regard to preferences. Received November 26, 2019; editorial decision May 23, 2020 by Editor Jeffrey Pontiff. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Between 2001 and 2007, the complexity of commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) increased substantially. The median size of commercial mortgage loan pools tripled and the median number of AAA-rated tranches doubled. I examine whether deal complexity is related to loan performance by analyzing a sample of approximately 40,000 commercial mortgage loans from 334 CMBS deals. I find that loan performance is worse for loans in more complex securitizations. However, neither the price of a deal’s securities nor a deal’s risk retention reflected that complexity correlates with lower loan quality. These findings present a challenge for theories of optimal security design.

Although few academic economists today endorse a gold standard, historical data show that actual gold standards have outperformed actual fiat standards in at least five respects. Gold standards have exhibited: (1) lower mean inflation rate, hence lower deadweight cost of economizing on money balances; (2) lower price level uncertainty, hence deeper long-term bond markets; (3) greater international trade and capital flows, due to network benefits of a common currency area; (4) lower resource costs of gold mining for monetary purposes with a lower real price of gold, due to the absence of private demand to hold gold as an inflation hedge; and (5) greater fiscal discipline. Returning to a gold standard would be immediately feasible for the US, the Eurozone, and Switzerland, where official gold stocks are large enough at the current price of gold to provide historically reasonable reserve ratios behind broader monetary aggregates. Other major nations (Japan, UK, China) would have to purchase gold.

This paper reviews critical legal and policy issues created by cross-border banking insolvencies. These include (I) Insolvency principles, such as (1) criteria for intervention; (2) deposit insurance; (3) power to manage; (4) ability to maximize recoveries. Also included is (II) International legal complications. Critical issues in cross-border crisis management involve: (1) division of labor between home and host countries; (2) the availability of information; (3) the legal, regulatory and supervisory framework; (4) the law governing initiation of proceedings; (5) grounds for intervention; (6) deposit insurance; (7) legal powers of controlling authorities; (8) the potential financial and economic effects. We conclude with a few proposals for cooperation.

We show that the noninformation component of trading costs is priced in the cross-section of stock returns using intraday data for NYSE/AMEX stocks. More importantly, we show that the noninformation component is much larger and more strongly related to stock returns than is the adverse-selection component, indicating that the noninformation component plays a more important role in asset pricing than does the adverse-section component. We conduct a variety of robustness tests and show that our main results hold for different estimation methods, measures of the adverse-selection cost, subsample periods, and control variables. We offer plausible explanations for these results. Received December 27, 2014; accepted January 11, 2016 by Editor Maureen O’Hara.

This paper describes the background and objectives of a series of papers written fifty years ago at the London School of Economics (LSE). One objective was to encourage the use of accounting numbers in economic research. A second objective was to improve the theory and practice of accounting. Understanding cost accounting and opportunity costs within a firm was tied to understanding the organization of firms. The theory of the accounting system is part of the theory of the firm. Like a similar request made fifty years ago, the paper concludes with a call for interdisciplinary studies between economics and accounting.

This paper's results are consistent with the choice of accounting method in the oil and gas industry being dominated by measurable characteristics of firms and guided by the principles of efficient contracting. The results are inconsistent with an alternative hypothesis, opportunistic behavior by managers. The efficient contracting explanation is also consistent with the empirical findings from earlier studies; [e.g., Lilien and Pastena (1982) and Deakin 1979)].

Over the past 3 decades, the U.S. Temporary Help Services (THS) industry grew five times more rapidly than overall employment. Contemporaneously, courts in 46 states adopted exceptions to the common law doctrine of employment at will that limited employers' discretion to terminate workers and opened them to litigation. This article assesses the contribution of "unjust dismissal" doctrine to THS employment specifically, and outsourcing more generally, finding that it is substantialexplaining 20% of the growth of THS between 1973 and 1995 and contributing 500,000 additional outsourced workers in 2000. States with smaller declines in unionization also saw substantially more THS growth.