Take the Goods and Run: Contracting Frictions and Market Power in Supply Chains
研究了卖方有市场势力且合同无法外部执行时，自我执行的关系协议效率，利用厄瓜多尔制造业供应链数据发现双边贸易在关系初期低效但随时间趋于高效，反事实模拟表明市场势力和执行问题都导致贸易低效。
This paper studies the efficiency of self-enforced relational agreements, a common solution to contracting frictions, when sellers have market power and contracts cannot be externally enforced. To this end, I develop a dynamic contracting model with limited enforcement in which buyers can default on their trade credit debt and estimate it using a novel dataset from the Ecuadorian manufacturing supply chain. The key empirical finding is that bilateral trade is inefficiently low in early periods of the relationship, but converges toward efficiency over time, despite sellers’ market power. Counterfactual simulations imply that both market power and enforcement contribute to inefficiencies in trade.