Essays in industrial organization

Resum

In this thesis, I study two important issues in the field of industrial organization: competition between firms with different business models and its effects on market allocation, and the relation between innovative activity and employment at the firm level. The first chapter entitled "Employment and innovation: Firm level evidence from Argentina" is a joint work with David Giuliodori and Rodolfo Stucchi. This chapter provides evidence about the effect of innovation on employment in Argentina in the period 1998-2001. In particular, we quantify the effect of process and product innovations on employment growth and the skill composition. Our results show that: (i) Product innovations have a positive effect on employment growth biased toward skill labor; (ii) Process innovations do not affect employment growth or composition; (iii) There are no heterogeneous effects in technology intensity and size, (iv) Most of the contraction in employment in this period was explained by noninnovators. The second chapter entitled "Industry equilibrium with open-source and proprietary firms" is a joint work with Gast on Llanes. This chapter presents a model of industry equilibrium to study the coexistence of open-source and proprietary firms. Two novel aspects of the model are (i) participation in open source arises as the optimal decision of pro t-maximizing firms, and (ii) open-source and proprietary firms may (or may not) coexist in equilibrium. Firms decide their type and investment in R&D, and sell packages composed of a primary good and a complementary private good. Open-source firms share their technological advances on the primary good, whereas proprietary firms keep their innovations private. The main contribution of the chapter is to determine conditions under which open-source and proprietary firms coexist in equilibrium. Interestingly, this equilibrium is characterized by an asymmetric market structure, with few large proprietary firms and many small open-source firms. The third chapter entitled "Competition between single-market and multimarket banks: Evidence from the US Banking Industry" estimates comparative advantages and disadvantages between single-market and multimarket banks. In the banking industry, due to the relevance of the branch's location, the relevant market is a local market. Based on this fact, the chapter defines two types of competitors: banks with branches in only one local market called single-market banks, and banks with branches in multiple local markets called multimarket banks. The main results of the paper are: (i) incumbent single-market banks have a comparative advantage with multimarket banks in a sample of small urban and rural markets, and (ii) single-market banks face higher expansion costs into other local markets than mutlimarket banks. This chapter presents two main contributions. First, it contributes to the discussion about agency problems for hierarchical firms in markets with asymmetric information. Second, it suggests the possibility of unexpected consequences after a deregulation of the expansion restrictions that lesser the barrier to entry for multimarket banks.