Stock price synchronicity has been attributed to poor corporate governance and a lack of firm-level transparency. This paper investigates the association between different kinds of firm interlocks, control groups, and synchronicity in Chile. A unique data set containing equity cross-holdings, common individual owners, and director interlocks is used to map out firm ties and control groups. While there is a correlation between synchronicity and share ownership and equity ties, synchronicity is more strongly correlated with interlocking directorates. The presence of share directors is associated with either reduced firm-level transparency or increased correlation in firm fundamentals—due, for example, to joint resource allocation across the firms.

Online markets for remote labour services allow workers and firms to contract with each other directly. Despite this, intermediaries—called outsourcing agencies—have emerged in these markets. This article shows that agencies signal to employers that inexperienced workers are high quality. Workers affiliated with an agency have substantially higher job-finding probabilities and wages at the beginning of their careers compared to similar workers without an agency affiliation. This advantage declines after high-quality non-affiliated workers receive good public feedback scores. The results indicate that intermediaries have arisen endogenously to permit a more efficient allocation of workers to jobs.

Online labor platforms for short-term, remote work have many more job seekers than available jobs. Despite their relative abundance, workers capture a substantial share of the surplus from transactions. We draw this conclusion from demand estimates that imply workers' wages include significant markups over costs and a survey that validates our surplus estimates. Demand-side search frictions and differentiated characteristics prevent workers from competing away supply-side surplus. Finally, we show that applying traditional employment regulations to online gig economy platforms would lower job posting and hiring rates, reducing aggregate surplus for all market participants, including workers.

This paper uses a rich panel dataset of Spanish manufacturing firms (1990–2006) and a propensity score reweighting estimator to show that multinational firms acquire the most productive domestic firms, which, on acquisition, conduct more product and process innovation (simultaneously adopting new machines and organizational practices) and adopt foreign technologies, leading to higher productivity. We propose a model of endogenous selection and innovation in heterogeneous firms that explains both the observed selection patterns and the innovation decisions. Further, we show in the data that innovation upon acquisition is associated with the increased market scale provided by the parent firm.

ABSTRACT This paper quantifies the aggregate effects of financing constraints. We start from a standard dynamic investment model with collateral constraints. In contrast to the existing quantitative literature, our estimation does not target the mean leverage ratio to identify the scope of financing frictions. Instead, we use a reduced‐form coefficient from the recent corporate finance literature that connects exogenous debt capacity shocks to corporate investment. Relative to a frictionless benchmark, collateral constraints induce losses of 7.1% for output and 1.4% for total factor productivity (TFP) (misallocation). We show these estimated losses tend to be more robust to misspecification than estimates obtained by targeting leverage.