Three Essays in Industrial Organization and Corporate Finance

Abstract

Soft bankruptcy allows a poor performing entrepreneur to renegotiate the terms of outstanding financial contracts, but at the same time it allows lenders to increase recovery rates. Hinging on this basic trade-off, the first Chapter of this thesis shows that a soft bankruptcy law designed as pure financial renegotiation may lead to investments that are biased towards the achievement of short-term results. However, if a soft bankruptcy code would encourage the entrepreneur to undertake a process of economic reorganization, the short-termism problem would be attenuated. Alternatively, the employment of contractual clauses that provide lenders with a tough punishment in case of entrepreneur's bad performance, like management turnover, can alleviate the short-term bias. In the second Chapter, I analyze technology adoption in a standardization consortium composed by a majority of vertically-integrated firms and a pure innovator, and its implications for social welfare. Like in most certification bodies, parties negotiate over the royalties after manufacturers' technology adoption and this generates a hold-up problem. Integrated operators can employ a standard with their inputs and circumvent the hold-up problem, or buy from the specialized firm and enjoy the cost-savings produced by its technology. I show that cross-licensing may lead to the inefficient exclusion of the pure innovator and that a policy of early-licensing commitments would result in efficient adoption choices. The third Chapter analyzes the profitability of vertical integration when downstream firms deal with suppliers of complementary intermediate goods with market power. The Chapter shows that the results in this setting are different from those of the models with substitute input-goods. In particular, vertical integration is not necessarily profitable, because the integrated firm faces the problem that the complementary input producer expropriates the higher profits earned downstream by the integrated chain. Interestingly, this effect is particularly strong the more efficient the integrated firm is.