This paper presents an auction model in which the seller may choose not to sell in spite of receiving a bid above the announced reserve price. Such behavior is seen frequently in auctions, yet would be suboptimal within most existing models. Here, the seller uses resale to signal information about the object's value that could not easily be communicated via a reserve price announcement. The model predicts that bids for reauctioned objects increase relative to initial bids and that, on average, prices of both reauctioned items and those sold at initial auction rise as delay in reauctioning increases.

In certain industries, sales agent contracts include provisions for sales commissions and clawbacks of commissions if clients are not retained. We show that contracts with these features arise in environments having up‐front selling costs recouped from ongoing sales; heterogeneous customers; limited agent access to capital markets; and imperfect commitment to long‐term contracts. We test the model using information on insurance sales agent contracts from New Zealand prior to and after bank entry into insurance sales. The evidence indicates that banks cream‐skimmed customers. We predict that this should reduce the values of sales commissions and clawbacks. The data support this prediction.

Americanae nace como un proyecto conjunto que surge dentro de la Red Europea de Información y Documentación sobre América Latina (REDIAL), y que ha afrontado la Biblioteca de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID). Esta nueva biblioteca virtual hace más accesibles los libros digitales de tema americanista a los investigadores y usuarios interesados de cualquier parte del mundo.

We show that the Armenter and Koren model's firm-product-country results rely on the assumption that export shipment size is independent of firm size, and this assumption is contradicted by the data. When actual shipment sizes are used in the balls-and-bins model, it cannot reproduce the data on single product/single country exporters. Beyond just showing that the shipment size assumption matters to balls-and-bins outcomes, our results highlight the important fact that shipment size is an economic decision, co-determined with other export choices. For this reason, we argue that a balls-and-bins model cannot be a purely statistical benchmark model. (JEL F11, F14, O13, O19, Q37)

We develop a novel methodology for disentangling the demand and cost drivers of firm heterogeneity when firms sort themselves into different markets, and we apply it to export status differences. Our methodology results in joint estimates of firm-level productivity and of markups in every market, without imposing functional form restrictions on demand. We find that exporters, relative to nonexporters, (i) have flatter domestic demand curves—thicker domestic markets—and (ii) have higher demand conditional on productivity. Finally, (iii) these demand advantages translate to foreign markets, thereby leading to export status differences.