This note corrects an error in an example in Meetings with Costly Participation (AER 90(4), 927-943). It characterizes the set of equilibria for the example under the assumptions in the paper, shows that in all the equilibria an interval of moderate po- sitions is devoid of participants, and provides assumptions under which the result as originally stated is correct.

The present article is an attempt to resolve the controversies concerning the concept of barriers to entry. We begin by contrasting the definitions of an entry barrier proposed in the economics literature. We then introduce a classification system to clear up the existing confusion, and we employ it to assess the nature of the barriers posed by scale economies and sunk costs.

Managed Care, Information, and Diffusion: The Case of Treatment for Heart-Attack Patients by Laurence C. Baker, Christopher C. Afendulis and Paul A. Heidenreich. Published in volume 94, issue 2, pages 347-351 of American Economic Review, May 2004

Longevity Expectations and Death: Can People Predict Their Own Demise? by V. Kerry Smith, Donald H. Taylor and Frank A. Sloan. Published in volume 91, issue 4, pages 1126-1134 of American Economic Review, September 2001

We study a collective decision-making process in which people interested in an issue may participate, at a cost, in a meeting, and the resulting decision is a compromise among the participants' preferences. We show that the equilibrium number of participants is small and their positions are extreme, and when the compromise is the median, the outcome is likely to be random. The model and its equilibria are consistent with evidence on the procedures and outcomes of U.S. regulatory hearings.

We measure how cuts to public procurement propagate through the banking system in a financial crisis. During the European sovereign debt crisis, the Portuguese government cut procurement spending by 4.3 percent of GDP. We find that this cut saddled banks with nonperforming loans from government contractors, which led to a persistent reduction in credit supply to other firms. We estimate a bank-level elasticity of credit supply with respect to procurement demand of 2.5. In a general equilibrium model, our findings point to large effects of fiscal policy on credit supply and output in a crisis.

The pace of job reallocation has declined in the United States in recent decades. We draw insight from canonical models of business dynamics in which reallocation can decline due to (i ) lower dis persion of idiosyncratic shocks faced by businesses, or (ii ) weaker marginal responsiveness of businesses to shocks. We show that shock dispersion has actually risen, while the responsiveness of business-level employment to productivity has weakened. Moreover, declining responsiveness can account for a significant fraction of the decline in the pace of job reallocation, and we find suggestive evidence this has been a drag on aggregate productivity.

A large literature documents declining measures of business dynamism including high-growth young firm activity and job reallocation. A distinct literature describes a slowdown in the pace of aggregate labor productivity growth. We relate these patterns by studying changes in productivity growth from the late 1990s to the mid 2000s using firm-level data. We find that diminished allocative efficiency gains can account for the productivity slowdown in a manner that interacts with the within-firm productivity growth distribution. The evidence suggests that the decline in dynamism is reason for concern and sheds light on debates about the causes of slowing productivity growth.

A growing body of evidence indicates that the U.S. economy has become less dynamic in recent years. This trend is evident in declining rates of gross job and worker flows as well as declining rates of entrepreneurship and young firm activity, and the trend is pervasive across industries, regions, and firm size classes. We describe the evidence on these changes in the U.S. economy by reviewing existing research. We then describe new empirical facts about the relationship between establishment-level productivity and employment growth, framing our results in terms of canonical models of firm dynamics and suggesting empirically testable potential explanations.