The impact of contract enforcement costs onoutsourcing and aggregate productivity


Full text


ISSN 2042-2695

CEP Discussion Paper No 1382

November 2015

The Impact of Contract Enforcement Costs on

Outsourcing and Aggregate Productivity



Legal institutions affect economic outcomes, but how much? This paper documents how costly supplier contract enforcement shapes firm boundaries, and quantifies the impact of this transaction cost on aggregate productivity and welfare. I embed a contracting game between a buyer and a supplier in a general-equilibrium model. Contract enforcement costs lead suppliers to under produce. Thus, firms will perform more of the production process in-house instead of outsourcing it. On a macroeconomic scale, in countries with slow and costly courts, firms should buy relatively less inputs from sectors whose products are more specific to the buyer-seller relationship. I present reduced-form evidence for this hypothesis using a novel measure of relationship-specificity, which I construct from microdata on US case law. I then structurally estimate my model, and perform welfare counterfactuals. Setting enforcement costs to US levels would increase real income by an average of 7.5 percent across all countries, and by an average of 15.3 percent across low-income countries. Hence, transaction costs and the determinants of firm boundaries are important for countries' aggregate level of development.

Keywords: Contract enforcement costs, contracting frictions, transaction costs, outsourcing, aggregate productivity

JEL codes: D23; F11; O43; L22

This paper was produced as part of the Centre’s Growth Programme. The Centre for Economic Performance is financed by the Economic and Social Research Council.

I thank Francesco Caselli, Veronica Rappoport, Catherine Thomas, and Luis Garicano for invaluable guidance, and Lorenzo Caliendo, Swati Dhingra, Ben Faber, Jason Garred, Sergei Guriev, Beata Javorcik, Kalina Manova, Thierry Mayer, Michael Peters, Markus Riegler, John Sutton, Silvana Tenreyro, John Van Reenen, and seminar participants at Alicante, ECARES, Edinburgh, Essex, Illinois, Insead, Johns Hopkins SAIS, LSE, LMU Munich, Oxford, Paris Trade Seminar, Rochester, Sciences Po, Stockholm School of Economics, Surrey, Warwick, and Yale, as well as audiences at many conferences for helpful comments. I am grateful to LexisNexis UK for granting me access to their data, and to the ESRC and a Bagri Fellowship for financial support.

Johannes Boehm, Assistant Professor, Sciences Po, Associate of CfM, and Associate at Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics.

Published by

Centre for Economic Performance

London School of Economics and Political Science Houghton Street

London WC2A 2AE

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher nor be issued to the public or circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

Requests for permission to reproduce any article or part of the Working Paper should be sent to the editor at the above address.




Countries differ vastly in the speed and cost of formal contract enforcement procedures: while Icelandic courts often resolve commercial disputes within a few months, cases in India that are decades old are commonplace.1 A large and prominent literature has argued that these institutional frictions constitute transaction costs between firms, which in turn affect their ver-tical integration decision (Williamson, 1985), and potentially even the pattern of development (North, 1990). The logic goes as follows: if enforcement of supplier contracts is costly or im-possible, firms will perform a larger part of the production process within the firm, instead of outsourcing it, thereby avoiding having to contract with an external supplier. This increases the cost of production.2 Higher production cost then feeds into higher input prices in downstream sectors, thus amplifying the distortions on the macroeconomic scale.3

This paper studies the quantitative importance of contract enforcement costs for aggregate outcomes using recently developed tools from quantitative trade theory, together with data on enforcement costs and intermediate input expenditure shares across countries. I make three contributions to our understanding of the role of institutions for economic outcomes. First, building on the seminal work of Eaton and Kortum (2002) and Antr`as (2003), I construct a tractable general-equilibrium model that reveals how contract enforcement costs, together with asset specificity, shape the firm’s domestic outsourcing decision and the economy’s industry structure. To describe contracting frictions, I extend the literature on hold-up in a bilateral buyer-seller relationship to a setting of enforceable contracts, where enforcement is subject to a cost and goods are relationship-specific. Contracts may alleviate hold-up problems only if enforcement costs are sufficiently low. Second, I find evidence for my model’s qualitative predic-tions on external input use using cross-country reduced-form regressions. Using microdata on case law from the United States I construct a new measure of dependence on formal enforcement institutions, which arises in the model because of relationship-specific investment. By counting the number of court cases between two sectors, and normalizing it, I obtain the relative preva-lence of litigation between these two sectors, which, for given enforcement costs, is informative about the extent to which firms rely on formal enforcement. The fact that this is a bilateral measure means that I can control for cross-country heterogeneity in the upstream sectors, and identify the effect of costly enforcement on outsourcing. Third, I show that the presence of contracting frictions in vertical relationships has large consequences for aggregate

productiv-1Council of Europe (2005), Supreme Court of India (2009)

2In a case study on the TV broadcasting industry in India, Anand and Khanna (2003) give the example of

the cable network firm Zee Telefilms Limited (ZTL), which was faced with a multitude of local cable operator firms that grossly understated the number of subscribers and underpaid fees. Litigation was slow and costly, thus ZTL was forced to expand into the cable operator’s business. The resulting distribution subsidiary was not profitable for the first five years after its inception, a long time in an industry that consisted mostly of small young firms.

3Nunn (2007) shows that institutional quality affects comparative advantage of a country through this

channel; see also the handbook chapter by Nunn and Trefler (2014). The idea of a ’multiplier effect’ goes back to Hirschman (1958), with more recent applications to development patterns by Ciccone (2002) and Jones (2011a, 2011b).


ity and welfare. I do this by structurally estimating my model and simulating the aggregate variables in the absence of enforcement costs. Hence, the effects of contracting frictions on firm boundaries, such as those studied by organizational economists in general, and by Antr`as (2003) and subsequent papers in the context of international trade, have large implications for aggregate productivity and welfare.

The analysis proceeds in several steps. I first propose a general-equilibrium model where firms face a binary decision between in-house production and domestic outsourcing for each task in the production process. Firms and suppliers draw independent productivity realizations for each task. In-house production uses labor, which is provided on a frictionless market. Outsourcing, however, is subject to contracting frictions that increase its effective cost. To understand what drives the magnitude of the distortion I explicitly model the interaction of the buyer and seller. The produced goods are relationship-specific, i.e. they are worth more within the buyer-seller relationship than to an outside party. Contracts specify a quantity to be delivered and a fee, and are enforceable at a cost which is proportional to the value of the claim.4 Courts do not enforce penal clauses in the contract, and award damages only to compensate the innocent party. This places strong limitations on the ability to punish the underperforming party, and may give rise to the seller breaching the contract in equilibrium. When the buyer holds up the seller, the seller could recover his fee net of damages by going to court. In the presence of enforcement costs, the amount the seller could recover is lower, leading him to ex-ante produce less than the efficient quantity. On the other hand, if enforcement costs are high and the resulting inefficiency is large, it may be preferable to write an unenforceable (informal, incomplete) contract, where the inefficiency depends on the degree of relationship-specificity (Klein, Crawford, and Alchian, 1979). This can be replicated through an enforceable contract where the specified quantity is zero.5 Thus, the overall distortion when using an optimal contract is the minimum of the distortions implied by enforcement costs (in the case of a formal contract, and breach) and relationship-specificity (in the case of an informal contract). Hence, the possibility of formal enforcement will improve outcomes when enforcement costs are low compared to the distortions under an informal contract.

Next, I provide empirical evidence for my model’s key qualitative prediction using cross-country reduced-form regressions. The model predicts that in countries where enforcement costs are high, firms spend less on inputs where (absent formal enforcement) distortions from hold-up problems would be very severe. I thus regress intermediate input expenditure shares by country and sector-pair on an interaction of country-wide enforcement costs and a sector-pair-level measure of dependence on formal enforcement institutions. I construct this measure of enforcement-intensity from data on case law from the United States for 1990-2012. Litigation can only be observed when firms write enforceable contracts to get around the hold-up problem, hence the prevalence of litigation is informative about the extent to which firms rely on formal

4Enforcement costs include time costs, court fees, and fees for legal representation and expert witnesses.

5The model thus provides a new economic rationale for preferring informal contracts over formal ones, where


enforcement institutions. My sector-pair-specific enforcement-intensity index is therefore the number of court cases with a firm from the upstream sector, per firm in the downstream sector. On the sector-pair-country level this measure, interacted with enforcement costs in the country, is negatively correlated with the downstream sector’s expenditure share on inputs from the upstream sector: in countries with high enforcement costs, intermediate input shares are lower for sector-pairs where litigation is common in the United States. Since this enforcement-intensity measure varies across sector-pairs, I can include country-upstream sector fixed effects and thus control for unobserved heterogeneity, such as differences in productivity and access to external financing, across sectors and countries. To the extent of my knowledge, my paper is the first to use this identification strategy in cross-country regressions. 6

Finally, I quantify the impact of enforcement costs on aggregate variables by structurally estimating the key parameters of my model and performing a set of counterfactual exercises. This is possible because my model exploits the tractability of multi-country Ricardian trade models, most notably the one of Eaton and Kortum (2002), even though these papers study an entirely different question. I obtain a relatively simple expression for intermediate input use between sectors, where contracting frictions distort input prices and lower intermediate input expenditure shares in the same way iceberg trade costs lower trade shares in the Eaton-Kortum model. I structurally estimate the key elasticities, along with country-specific parameters such as sectoral productivity levels, from data on intermediate input shares and enforcement costs. This allows me to perform welfare counterfactuals, and highlight the macroeconomic significance of transaction costs: reducing enforcement costs to zero would increase real income per capita by an average of 19.6 percent across all countries, and decrease consumer prices by an average of 11.9 percent. For many countries the welfare impact exceeds the gains from international trade that the literature has estimated. Since zero enforcement costs may be impossible to achieve in practice, I also calculate the counterfactual welfare gains when enforcement costs are set to US levels. The corresponding increase in real income would still be on average 7.5 percent across all countries, and on average 15.3 percent across low-income countries.

The paper contributes to the literature on legal institutions and their macroeconomic ef-fects.7 The challenges in this literature are twofold. First, it is hard to empirically identify the effect of institutions on macro-outcomes due to the presence of many unobserved factors that correlate with institutions and development. The literature on cross-country regressions in

6My enforcement-intensity index is positively correlated with industry-level measures of

relationship-specificity (Nunn 2007, Levchenko 2007, Bernard et al. 2010). These measures, however, are constructed

using data on input-output relationships, which are endogenous in my analysis, and/or are only available for physical goods. Furthermore, they only vary across sectors, whereas my enforcement intensity variable is at the sector-pair level, allowing me to identify the institutional channel from cross-country heterogeneity in sectoral productivity.

7For example, theoretical work by Acemoglu, Antr`as and Helpman (2007) studies the effects of contracting

frictions on the incentives to invest in technology. The empirical literature often employs reduced-form cross-country regressions, see Rajan and Zingales (1998), La Porta et al. (1998), Djankov et al. (2003), Acemoglu and Johnson (2005), and many others. Recent country-specific work include Laeven and Woodruff (2007) and Chemin (2010) on judicial efficiency in Mexico and, respectively, India; Ponticelli (2015) on bankruptcy reform in Brazil, and Cole, Greenwood, and Sanchez (2012) on courts and technology adoption in Mexico.


macroeconomics typically deals with this by trying to proxy for these unobserved factors. This introduces measurement error and other problems. By exploiting variation across countries and sector-pairs, I can include country-upstream-sector fixed effects and thus control for unob-served heterogeneity in country-industry pairs in a much cleaner way. Second, the importance of enforcement institutions is hard to quantify. I therefore guide my empirical analysis using a micro-founded model. The empirical counterpart for the enforcement cost maps exactly into the theoretical concept.

The paper is also related to the literature on the role of intermediate inputs for aggregate outcomes.8 These papers typically take the country’s input-output structure as exogenous, or even take the US input-output table to describe the industry structure across countries. I show that input-output tables differ substantially and systematically across countries and exploit this variation in my empirical analysis. In the model I endogenize the sectoral composition of the firm’s input baskets.

My paper draws heavily from the literature on contracting frictions and the sourcing decision in international trade;9 however, it departs from it in two substantial ways that allow me to quantify the effect of contracting frictions. Firstly, by assuming that enforcement is costly and that courts only protect expectation interest (both of which can be observed in reality, and measured), I am able to move away from a world of stark contrasts, where contracts are either perfectly enforceable or not enforceable at all. The resulting setting nests both extreme cases, but also allows for intermediate situations in which enforcement institutions play a quantiative, not only qualitative, role.10 Secondly, I choose to study only domestic buyer-seller relations. This has the advantage that I know the relevant jurisdiction (namely, the courts in that country), but mean that I potentially misestimate the true distortions coming from poor formal enforcement. This concern, however, is mitigated by two considerations. Much of the distortions are on the use of services inputs, which are particularly prone to hold-ups because the cost of investment is immediately sunk, but are typically performed within country borders. Moreover, any distortion to international trade due to contracting frictions cannot

8Among others, Hirschman (1958), Romer (1980), and Jones (2011a, 2011b) for economic growth, Acemoglu

et al. (2012) and Carvalho and Gabaix (2013) for fluctuations. Oberfield (2013) provides a firm-level theory for how input linkages shape aggregate productivity. Bartelme and Gorodnichenko (2014) document the cross-country dispersion in intermediate input shares, but do not study its determinants.

9My paper builds on the literature on the property rights approach to international firm boundaries (see

Antr`as (2015) for a summary) and the literature on institutions and international trade, as surveyed in the

Handbook chapter by Nunn and Trefler (2014). Khandelwal and Topalova (2011) show that increased access to intermediate inputs increases firm productivity. Nunn (2007) uses cross-country regressions to show that contracting institutions shape comparative advantage and explains this using a story similar to mine. Compared to his work, I show direct evidence on input use and study the quantitative effects of contracting institutions. To keep my model sufficiently tractable to allow estimation of the parameters, I draw from the literature on quantitative trade models, see Eaton and Kortum (2002), Chor (2010), Costinot, Donaldson, and Komunjer (2012), Caliendo and Parro (2015), and Arkolakis, Costinot, and Rodriguez-Clare (2012). Recently, Eaton, Kortum, and Kramarz (2015) provide a firm-level theory of international vertical linkages and the division of labor. Recent micro-level evidence comes from Alfaro et al. (2015a, 2015b).

10cf. North (1990): “A good deal of literature on transaction costs takes enforcement as a given, assuming

either that it is perfect or that it is constantly imperfect. In fact, enforcement is seldom either, and the structure of enforcement mechanisms and the frequency and severity of imperfection play a major role in the costs of transacting and in the forms that contracts take.”


cause a welfare loss greater than the overall gains from trade, which suggests that (at least for relatively large countries) my estimates cover the bulk of the relevant distortions.11

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 describes a macromodel of input choice, where contracting frictions distort the firm’s make-or-buy decision. Section 3 qualitatively assesses the model’s key prediction using cross-country reduced-form regressions. Section 4 structurally estimates the model of section 2, and evaluates the productivity and welfare implications of costly contract enforcement. Section 5 concludes.


A Macroeconomic Model of Input Sourcing

This section presents a macroeconomic model where firms face the decision between producing in-house and outsourcing. The model economy is closed. Outsourcing is subject to frictions due to the presence of contract enforcement costs. These frictions distort the relative price of outsourcing, and thus lead to over-use of in-house production. I first discuss the firm’s production functions, and then turn to the modes of sourcing. I pay particular attention to the contracting game that is played in the case of outsourcing, explaining how and when enforcement costs matter, and derive an expression for the magnitude of price distortions. Finally, I put the model into general equilibrium by adding households, and derive predictions for aggregate input use.

Methodologically, the model exploits the tractability of the Eaton and Kortum (2002) ap-proach to modeling discrete sourcing decisions, albeit for a very different purpose. I model the firm’s binary decision to outsource in the same way as Eaton and Kortum model the decision which country to buy from. The contracting frictions in my model, for which I provide a mi-crofoundation, enter the expression for intermediate input shares in the same way that iceberg trade costs enter the expression for trade shares in Eaton-Kortum. This allows me to model both frictions and input-output linkages between sectors in a tractable way, and it simplifies the structural estimation and evaluation of the welfare implications.



There are N sectors in the economy, each consisting of a mass of perfectly competitive and homogeneous firms. Sector n firms convert inputs {(qni(j), j ∈ [0, 1]}i=1,...,N into output yn

11Indeed, Irarrazabal et al. (2013) argue that exporting and multinational production are close substitutes.

Garetto (2013) estimates that the gains from intra-firm international trade are roughly 0.23 percent of consump-tion per capita. For more complex sourcing strategies, see Ramondo and Rodriguez-Clare (2013). Fally and Hillberry (2015) offer a related model, but focus on the tradeoff between intra-firm coordination costs versus inter-firm transaction costs instead of the institutional dimension.


according to the production function12 yn = N Y i=1 Z 1 0 qni(j)(σn−1)/σndj σn−1σn γni , n = 1, . . . , N. (2.1) whereP

iγni= 1 for all n = 1, . . . , N . The sets {(n, i, j), j ∈ [0, 1]}i=1,...,N are the sets of inputs that sector n may source from a firm belonging to sector i, or, alternatively, produce itself using labor. The index j denotes the individual activities/varieties within each basket. As an exam-ple, consider a car manufacturing plant. Then, n = car and i ∈ {metal, electricity, R&D, . . . } are the different broad sets of activities, corresponding to the different upstream (roughly 2-digit) sectors, that need to be performed during the production process. The index j cor-responds to the individual varieties of inputs (in the case of physical inputs) or tasks (in the case of intangible inputs) in each basket (n, i). The firm faces the outsourcing decision for every (n, i, j): a manufacturing plant may want to contract with an accounting firm to do the accounting for them, or decide to employ an accountant themselves, perhaps at a higher cost. In this case, the activity j would be ’accounting’, and the upstream industry i would be the business services sector. The technological parameters γni captures the weight of the broad set of inputs i in the production process of sector n: γcars,steel will be high, whereas γcars,agriculture will be low.

For each activity (n, i, j), the sector n firms have to decide whether to produce the activity themselves, or to outsource it. I model the boundaries of firms to be determined primarily by their capabilities.13 Both the downstream firm and the potential suppliers draw an activity-specific productivity realization, which determine the cost of each option. The downstream firm decides on whether to outsource by comparing them. Outsourcing, however, is subject to contracting frictions, which increase its cost and thus lead to too much in-house production compared to a frictionless world. In order to keep the firm’s decision problem tractable, I model outsourcing as buying activity (n, i, j) from a sector i firm via an intermediary. Once the decision has been taken, it is irreversible.14 I discuss each of the two options in turn. 2.1.1 In-house Production

The sector n firm can produce activity (n, i, j) itself by employing labor. One unit of labor generates sni(j) units of activity (n, i, j), thus the production function is qni(j) = sni(j)l(n, i, j), where l(n, i, j) is labor used and sni(j) is a stochastic productivity realization that follows a Fr´echet distribution,

P (sni(j) < z) = e−Snz −θ


12This is a model where every sector buys from every other sector, but apart from parameters, they are all

ex-ante identical. In a bilateral trade between two sectors, I always denote the downstream (buying) sector by n and the upstream (selling) sector by i.

13This can be motivated by managers having a limited span of control (Lucas, 1978), or that there are

resources that cannot be transferred across firms (Wernerfelt, 1984).

14This eliminates competition between the potential employees and the suppliers. Bernard et al. (2003) relax


I assume that the sni(j) are independent across i, j, and n. The parameter Sn captures the overall productivity of in-house production by sector n firms: higher Snwill, on average, lead to higher realizations of the productivity parameters sni(j). The parameter θ is inversely related to the variance of the distribution. The labor market is perfectly competitive. Denote the wage by w, and the cost of one unit of activity (n, i, j) conditional on in-house production by plni(j). Then,

plni(j) = w sni(j)

. (2.2)

2.1.2 Arm’s Length Transaction

In case of outsourcing, the sector n firms post their demand function to an intermediary. There is one intermediary per activity. In turn, the intermediary sources the goods from a sector i firm (’supplier’), who tailors the goods to the relationship. The intermediary then sells the goods on to the downstream sector firm, earning revenue R(·), as given by the downstream firm’s demand function. The interaction between supplier and intermediary is the one that is subject to contracting frictions.

When dealing with the supplier, the intermediary chooses a contract that maximizes its profit subject to participation by a supplier firm. The supplier’s outside option is zero. I will show that the chosen contract pushes the supplier down to its outside option, which means that this is also the contract that the social planner would choose if he wanted to maximize the overall surplus (conditional on the frictions). One supplier is chosen at random, and the intermediary and the supplier are locked into a bilateral relationship.

Suppliers can transform one unit of sector i output (produced using the production function (2.1)) into zni(j) units of variety (n, i, j), thus the production function is qni(j) = zni(j)yi(n, i, j), with yi(n, i, j) being the amount of sector i goods used as inputs.15 Again I assume that zni(j) follows a Fr´echet distribution,

P (zni(j) < z) = e−Tiz −θ

and independent across i, j, and n. The average productivity realization is increasing in the pa-rameter Ti, which captures the upstream sector’s overall capabilities (productivity, endowments, etc.). The supplier’s cost of producing one unit of variety (n, i, j) is then cni(j) = pi/zni(j), where pi is the price index of sector i’s output good, (2.1). The production of the variety is partially reversible: by reverting, the supplier can get a fraction ωni ≤ 1 of its production cost back by selling it on the Walrasian market for the sector i good. This is meant to capture the degree of relationship-specificity of the variety: if ωni = 1, the variety is not tailored to the relationship at all, whereas ωni = 0 means that the good is worthless outside the relationship. All parameters, including the productivity realizations zni(j), are common knowledge. I drop subscripts (n, i, j) for the remainder of the contracting game to simplify the notation.

15The assumption that variety (n, i, j) is produced using sector i goods in the case of outsourcing means that

the model exhibits input-output linkages across sectors. Ultimately, the whole production process is done using labor and a constant returns to scale production technology; the distinction between labor and intermediate inputs simply draws the firm boundaries and allows for better comparison with the data.


Figure 1: Timeline of the contracting game t1 t2 t3 t4 t5 t6 Supplier produces q units, delivers min(q, q∗) Intermediary either pays fee M (q) or holds up the supplier Nash bargaining to settle contract Nash bargaining over any excess production Intermediary sells the goods to the downstream sector firm and receives R(q) Intermediary

and supplier sign contract (q∗, M (q))

The description of the contracting game proceeds as follows. I first describe the contracting space, and discuss the timing of events and the enforcement mechanism. I then solve the contracting game. Going back in time, I describe the problem of finding an optimal contract and characterize the equilibrium thereunder. I then return to the implications for input prices under arm’s length transaction.

The contract The contract between intermediary and supplier is a pair (q∗, M (·)), where q∗ ≥ 0 is the quantity of the good to be delivered16, and M : [0, q] → R\Ris a nonnegative, increasing real-valued function that represents the stipulated payment to the supplier. M (q∗) is the agreed fee. If M (q) < M (q∗) for q < q∗, this represents damage payments that are agreed upon at the time of the formation of the contract, for enforcement in case of a breach of contract (“liquidated damages”).17 I will explain the exact enforcement procedure after stating the timing of events.

Timing of events

1. The intermediary and the supplier sign a contract (M (q), q∗) which maximizes the inter-mediary’s payoff, subject to the supplier’s payoff being nonnegative. At this point the intermediary cannot perfectly commit to paying M (q) once production has taken place, other than through the enforcement mechanism explained below.

2. The supplier produces q units. He chooses q optimally to maximize his profits. I assume that if q < q∗, he delivers all the produced units; if q ≥ q∗, he delivers q∗ and retains control of the remaining units.18 A unit that has been delivered is under the control of the intermediary.

16The supplier’s chosen quantity q may likewise be interpreted as quality of the product, or effort. The legal

literature calls this relationship-specific investment reliance (Hermalin et al., 2007).

17Most jurisdictions impose strong limits on punishment under these clauses. In English law, in terrorem

clauses in contracts are not enforced (Treitel, 1987, Chapter 20). German and French courts, following the Roman tradition of literal enforcement of stipulationes poenae, generally recognize penal clauses in contracts, but will, upon application, reduce the penalty to a ’reasonable’ amount (BGB § 343, resp. art. 1152 & 1231, code civil, and Zimmermann, 1996, Chapter 4). Given my assumptions on the courts awarding expectation damages (see below), any restrictions on M are not going to matter.

18Appendix B.1 considers an extension where the supplier decides about how much to deliver. The equilibrium

production (and therefore inefficiency) under an optimal contract remains the same as in the model from the main text. See also Edlin and Reichelstein (1996).


3. The intermediary decides whether or not to hold up the supplier by refusing to pay M (q). 4. If the contract has been breached (either because q < q∗ or because the intermediary did not pay the fee M (q)), either party could enforce the contract in a court. The outcome of enforcement is deterministic, and enforcement is costly. Hence, the two parties avoid this ex-post efficiency loss by settling out of court. They split the surplus using the symmetric Nash sharing rule, whereby each party receives the payoff under the outside option (i.e. the payoff under enforcement), plus half of what would have been lost to them in the case of enforcement (the enforcement costs). I explain the payoffs under enforcement below. 5. In case the supplier has retained control over some of the produced units, q − q∗, the

two parties may bargain over them. Again I assume that they split the surplus according to the symmetric Nash sharing rule. Since there is no contract to govern the sale of these goods, the outside option is given by the supplier’s option to revert the production process.

6. The intermediary sells the goods on to the downstream firm, receiving revenue R(q). Enforcement After the intermediary’s decision whether or not to hold up the supplier, either party may feel that they have been harmed by the other party’s actions: the supplier may have produced less than what was specified (q < q∗), and the intermediary may have withheld the fee M (q). Either party may enforce the contract in the court. The court perfectly observes all actions by both parties, and awards expectation damages as a remedy. The basic principle to govern the measurement of these damages is that an injured party is entitled to be put “in as good a position as one would have been in had the contract been performed” (Farnsworth (2004), §12.8). The precise interpretation of this rule is as follows:

• If the supplier has breached the contract, q < q∗, he has to pay the intermediary the difference between the intermediary’s payoff under fulfillment, R(q∗) − M (q∗), and under breach, R(q) − M (q). Hence, he has to pay

D(q, q∗) = R(q∗) − M (q∗) − (R(q) − M (q)) .

• In addition, if the intermediary has not paid the fee M (q), the court orders him to do so. It is important to stress that the resulting net transfer may go in either direction, depending on whether or not the parties are in breach, and on the relative magnitude of M (q) and D(q, q∗). I assume furthermore that the plaintiff has to pay enforcement costs, which amount to a fraction δ of the value of the claim to him. The value of the claim is the net transfer to him that would arise under enforcement.19 These costs include court fees, fees for legal representation

19If the net transfer is negative, he would not have chosen to enforce in the first place. However, the other

party would then have had an incentive to enforce, and would have been the plaintiff. I show later that in equilibrium the plaintiff is always the supplier.


and expert witnesses, and the time cost. The assumption that enforcement costs are increasing in the value of the claim is in line with empirical evidence (Lee and Willging, 2010), and also strengthens the link between the model and the empirical analysis in Section 3: my data for enforcement costs are given as a fraction of the value of the claim.20 In line with the situation in the United States, I assume that enforcement costs cannot be recovered in court (Farnsworth, 2004, §12.8).21

Solving for the equilibrium of the contracting game I solve for a subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium, which, for a given contract, consists of the supplier’s production choice qs and the intermediary’s holdup decision, as a function of q. The holdup decision function gives the intermediary’s optimal response to a produced quantity q, and the optimal production choice qsis then the supplier’s optimal quantity q, taking the holdup decision function as given. The full solution of the game is in Appendix A. Here, I discuss the intuition for the optimal responses and the payoff functions.

Case 1: Seller breaches the contract. Consider first the case where the supplier decides to breach, q < q∗. The intermediary refuses to pay M (q), in order to shift the burden of enforcement (and thus the enforcement costs) on the supplier. Hence, in the case of enforcement, the supplier would receive a net transfer of M (q) − D(q, q∗). This transfer is positive: if it was negative, the supplier’s overall payoff would be negative and he would not have accepted the contract in the first place. Thus, under enforcement, the supplier would be the plaintiff and would have to pay the enforcement costs. To avoid the efficiency loss, the two parties bargain over the surplus and settle outside of court. Under the symmetric Nash sharing rule each party receives its outside option (the payoff under enforcement) plus one half of the quasi-rents (the enforcement costs). Thus, the supplier’s overall payoff under breach is

πs(q, M, q∗) = (1 − δ) (M (q) − D(q, q∗))

| {z }

payoff under enforcement

+ 1 2δ (M (q) − D(q, q ∗ )) | {z } quasi-rents − qcni(j) | {z } production cost (2.3)

if q < q∗. Since D(q, q∗) = R(q∗) − M (q∗) − (R(q) − M (q)), the above simplifies to

πs(q, M, q∗) =  1 −1 2δ  (R(q) − R(q∗) + M (q∗)) − qcni(j) if q < q∗. (2.4)

Note that the intermediary’s revenue function R appears in the supplier’s payoff function. This is due to the courts awarding expectation damages: the fact that damage payments are assessed

20Having the cost of enforcement in proportion to the value of the claim may also be seen as a desirable, to

align the incentives of the plaintiff’s attorney with those of the plaintiff. Following the report on civil litigation costs in England and Wales by Lord Justice Jackson (Jackson, 2009b), the UK government passed reforms to bring costs more in line with the value of the claims.

21Many countries have the enforcement costs paid by the losing party (’cost shifting’). See Jackson (2009a)

for a comparative analysis. While cost shifting may mean that in some circumstances punishment would be possible and therefore higher quantities could be implemented, the resulting model does not allow for closed-form solutions.


to compensate the intermediary for forgone revenue means that the supplier internalizes the payoff to the intermediary. The enforcement costs δ govern the supplier’s outside option, and hence the settlement: higher enforcement costs means that the supplier can recover a smaller fraction of his fee net of damages; therefore, the terms of the settlement are worse for him. Note also that the contract (q∗, M ) enters (2.4) only through q∗ and M (q∗), and only in an additive manner. This is because the court awards damages such that the sum of liquidated damages and expectation damages exactly compensates the intermediary. If enforcement costs δ were zero, the expectations damages rule would ensure an outcome that is efficient within the bilateral relationship.22

Case 2: Seller fulfills the contract. Consider next the case where the supplier fulfills his part of the contract, q ≥ q∗. He delivers q∗ units to the intermediary, and keeps the remaining units to himself. As in the case above, the intermediary refuses to pay the fee M (q∗): subsequent enforcement of the contract would leave the seller with a payoff of only (1 − δ)M (q∗); hence, under the settlement with the symmetric Nash solution, the intermediary only has to pay (1 − 12δ)M (q∗). After the settlement of the contract, the two parties may bargain over the remaining q − q∗ units. The Nash sharing rule leaves the supplier with its outside option (what he would get by reversing the production process for the q − q∗ units) plus one half of the quasi-rents. Thus, the supplier’s overall profits are

πs(q, M, q∗) =  1 −1 2δ  M (q∗) | {z } contract payoff + ωnicni(j) (q − q∗) | {z }

payoff under reverting +1 2(R(q) − R(q ∗ ) − ωnicni(j) (q − q∗)) | {z } quasi-rents − qcni(j) | {z } production cost (2.5)

if q ≥ q∗. Hence, even in the case where the supplier fulfills his part of the contract, the contract (q∗, M ) only enters additively in the supplier’s payoff function. The terms of the bargaining that governs the marginal return on production are now given by the degree of relationship-specificity. A higher degree of relationship-specificity, captured by a lower ωni, worsens the supplier’s outside option and hence lowers his payoff under the settlement.

Going back in time, the supplier chooses q to maximize his profits, given piecewise by (2.4) and (2.5). The supplier’s profit function is continuous at q∗, and the shape of the ex-ante specified payoff schedule M does not affect πs. This means that the intermediary is unable to punish the supplier for producing less than the stipulated quantity, and q < q∗ may happen in equilibrium.

Optimal Contract We now turn to the intermediary’s problem of finding an optimal con-tract. He chooses a contract (M, q∗) that maximizes his payoff πb subject to participation by

22This point was first made by Shavell (1980), who argued that when courts assign expectation damages,

the parties may achieve first-best even if the contractually specified payoff is not state-contingent. Similarly, I argue here that under expectation damages the state-contingent payoffs do not matter, and that the presence of proportional enforcement costs then leads to efficiency loss.


the supplier, (M, q∗) = arg max ( ˆM , ˆq∗) πb  qs( ˆM , ˆq∗), ˆM , ˆq∗  (2.6) s.t. πs  qs( ˆM , ˆq∗), ˆM , ˆq∗  ≥ 0 (2.7)

where qs( ˆM , ˆq∗) is the supplier’s profit-maximizing quantity, qs( ˆM , ˆq∗) = arg max


πs(q, ˆM , ˆq∗).

Since there is no ex-post efficiency loss, the intermediary’s payoff πb is the total surplus minus the supplier’s payoff,

πb  q, ˆM , ˆq∗= R(q) − qc ni(j) − πs  q, ˆM , ˆq∗.

In the solution to the contracting game above, we have shown that a contract (M, q∗) enters the payoff functions in each case only in an additive manner. Therefore, by setting q∗ and M , the intermediary can only influence the supplier’s decision by shifting the threshold for breach q∗. In choosing an optimal contract, the intermediary thus decides whether he wants to implement the interior maximum in the case of breach by the seller (case 1), or the interior maximum in case of fulfillment by the supplier (case 2). He will choose the case that is associated with the smaller amount of distortions. The following proposition formalizes this intuition, and characterizes the equilibrium under an optimal contract. It describes (1) the produced quantity, (2) whether the equilibrium features a breach or a fulfillment by the seller, and (3) the distribution of the rents between the two parties. Appendix A contains the proof. Proposition 1 (Equilibrium under an optimal contract) An optimal contract (M, q∗) sat-isfies the following properties:

1. The quantity implemented, qs(M, q∗), satisfies dR(q) dq q=qs(M,q∗) = min  2 − ωni, 1 1 − 12δ  c (2.8) 2. qs(M, q∗) < q∗ if and only if (1 − 12δ)−1 < 2 − ωni.

3. The whole surplus from the relationship goes to the intermediary: πs(qs(M, q∗), M, q∗) = 0

To interpret this result, it is helpful to compare the equilibrium quantity qs(M, q∗) to the first-best quantity ˜q, which is defined as the quantity that maximizes the overall surplus from


the relationship,


q ≡ arg max q≥0

R(q) − qcni(j).

The first statement of Proposition 1 says that the equilibrium quantity produced under an optimal contract, qs(M, q∗), is lower than the first-best quantity ˜q (recall that R is concave, and that 2 − ωni> 1). The intuition for the efficiency loss depends on whether the equilibrium features a breach or a fulfillment by the supplier. If the supplier breaches by producing q < q∗, the presence of proportional enforcement costs mean that the supplier could only recover a smaller fraction of his fee net of damages by going to court. Under the settlement he does not get the full return on his effort, which causes him to ex-ante produce less than the efficient quantity. Note that in the absence of enforcement costs (δ = 0), the supplier completely internalizes the intermediary’s payoff through the expectation damages, and the resulting outcome would be first-best. The magnitude of the efficiency loss in this case depends solely on the magnitude of enforcement costs. In the case where the supplier fulfills his part of the contract, q ≥ q∗, the degree of relationship-specificity governs the supplier’s outside option in the bargaining, and thus the marginal return on production. A higher relationship-specificity (lower ωni) means that the supplier’s outside option becomes worse, which results in a lower payoff under the settlement. The supplier anticipates the lower ex-post return on production, and produces less (Klein et al., 1979).

The second statement says that the optimal contract implements a breach by the seller if and only if the cost of enforcement is low compared to the degree of relationship-specificity. Given that it is impossible to implement the efficient quantity, the optimal contract implements the case with the lower associated distortions (hence also the minimum function in expression (2.8)). If the cost of enforcement is relatively low, the optimal contract implements a breach by setting a high q∗: after the hold-up, the control over the produced units is with the intermediary, and the supplier’s only asset is the enforceable contract whose value depends on the (relatively low) enforcement costs. On the other hand, when the degree of relationship-specificity is low and enforcement costs are high, the optimal contract will pick a low q∗ to allocate the residual rights of control over the excess production q − q∗ with the supplier. In that case, his ex-post return on production depends on his ability to reverse the production (i.e. the parameter ωni). Hence, the optimal contract maximizes the surplus by maximizing the producer’s ex-post return on production.23

The third statement says that the above is implementable while still allocating the whole surplus from the relationship to the intermediary. This is not trivial, since the supplier’s payoff schedule M is required to be nonnegative.

The reader may be concerned about the possibility of ’overproduction’ (q > q∗) arising as an equilibrium outcome in the model despite there being little evidence on this actually happening in practice. The right way to interpret such an equilibrium is as an outcome to an

23This is similar to the optimal allocation of property rights (Grossman and Hart, 1986, Hart and Moore,


informal contract, where the option to enforce the claim in a court is either non-existent or irrelevant. Indeed, a contract where M = 0 and q∗ = 0 would be equivalent to the situation where enforceable contract are not available, as in the literature on incomplete contracts (Klein et al., 1979, and others). The only reason why the optimal contract in this case features a small but positive q∗ is because this allows the intermediary to obtain the full surplus from the relationship. If I allowed for an ex-ante transfer from the supplier to the intermediary, setting q∗ and M to zero would be an optimal contract in the case where the degree of relationship-specificity is relatively low compared to enforcement costs.24

To summarize, the main benefit of having enforceable contracts is that when the stipulated quantity q∗ is sufficiently high, the degree of relationship-specificity does not matter for the resulting allocation and the ex-ante investment. The drawback is that the presence of enforce-ment costs distorts the supplier’s decision. Hence, choosing a high q∗ will only be optimal if the degree of relationship-specificity is sufficiently high, so that the efficiency loss associated with a breach is lower than the efficiency loss associated with an unenforceable contract.

The model also yields a qualitative prediction on the occurrence of breach, which I will use later to construct an empirical counterpart to the theoretical concept of relationship-specificity. Corollary 2 (Relationship-specificity and breach) Let δ < 1 and the parties sign an op-timal contract. Then, for sufficiently high degree of relationship-specificity (i.e. for a sufficiently low ωni) the seller breaches the contract in equilibrium.

2.1.3 Returning to the Firm’s Outsourcing Decision

How does the contracting game fit into the macromodel? The intermediary’s profit-maximization problem is exactly the problem of finding an optimal contract, (2.6) and (2.7), where the rev-enue function R(q) is the product of the quantity q and the downstream sector firm’s inverse demand function for activity (n, i, j). The produced quantity under the optimal contract is then given by equation (2.8) in Proposition 1. The quantity distortion from the contracting frictions induces a move along the downstream sector firm’s demand curve, and hence increases the price to the downstream sector firm. We obtain the price of activity (n, i, j) under arm’s length transaction by inserting the produced quantity into the inverse demand function:

pxni(j) = µnpidni zni(j)

where µn= σn/ (σn− 1) is the markup due to monopolistic competition, and

dni = min  2 − ωni, 1 1 −12δ  (2.9)

24The model thus makes a case for the possible desirability of informal contracts: if the degree of

relationship-specificity is low and enforcement costs are high, it is preferable to choose an informal contract rather than


is the resulting price distortion due to contracting frictions. The functional form of dni in terms of the parameters ωni and δ is exactly the same as the distortion in equation (2.8).

Going back in time, the downstream sector firms decide on whether to produce in-house or to outsource by comparing the price of the good under the two regimes, pl

ni(j) and pxni(j). Given the perfect substitutability between the two options, the realized price of activity (n, i, j) is pni(j) = min plni(j), p x ni(j)  (2.10)


Households’ Preferences and Endowments

There is a representative household with Cobb-Douglas preferences over the consumption of goods from each sector,

U = N Y i=1 cηi i , (2.11) with PN

i=1ηi = 1. Households have a fixed labor endowment L and receive labor income wL and the profits of the intermediaries Π. Their budget constraint is PN

i=1pici ≤ wL + Π, and thus pici = ηi(wL + Π).


Equilibrium Prices and Allocations

I first describe prices and input use under cost minimization, and then define an equilibrium of the macromodel and show existence and uniqueness. All proofs are in Appendix A.

To describe sectoral price levels and expenditure shares, some definitions are helpful. Let Xni ≡


0 pni(j)qni(j)1{j:px

ni(j)<plni(j)}dj be the expenditure of sector n firms on activities that are sourced from sector i, and Xn =


0 pni(j)qni(j)dj the total expenditure (and gross output) of sector n. We then have

Proposition 3 (Sectoral price levels and expenditure shares) Under cost minimization by the downstream sector firms, the following statements hold:

1. The cost of producing one unit of raw output yn in sector n satisfies

pn= N Y i=1  αn γni Snw −θ+ T i(µnpidni)−θ −1θ γni (2.12)

where w is the wage, and αn ≡ Γ 1−σθ n + 1 1−σn1

, with Γ(·) being the gamma function. 2. The input expenditure shares Xni/Xn satisfy

Xni Xn = γni Ti(µnpidni) −θ Snw−θ+ Ti(µnpidni) −θ (2.13) Furthermore, Xni/Xn is decreasing in dni.


Proposition 3 gives expressions for the sectoral price levels and intermediate input expendi-ture shares. The sectoral price levels solve the system of equations (2.12), and depend on the cost of production under outsourcing and in-house production, and therefore on the produc-tivity parameters Ti and Sn, as well as contracting frictions dni. The fact that suppliers may themselves outsource part of their production process gives rise to input-output linkages be-tween sectors; the sectoral price levels are thus a weighted harmonic mean of the price levels of the other sectors. This amplifies the price distortions: an increase in the price of coal increases the prices of steel and, through steel, machines, which in turn increases the cost of producing steel further due to the steel industry’s dependence on machines.

The expenditure shares on intermediate inputs, equation (2.13), are then determined by the relative effective cost of outsourcing versus in-house production. Higher effective cost of out-sourcing will lead downstream firms to produce more activities in-house instead of outout-sourcing them. Thus, the expenditure share of sector n on inputs from sector i is increasing in sector i’s productivity, Ti, and the importance of sector i products for sector n, γni, and decreasing in sector i’s input cost pi and contracting frictions dni.

Proposition 3 yields the key qualitative prediction of the model, namely that contracting frictions, captured by dni> 1, negatively affect the downstream sector’s fraction of expenditure on intermediate inputs from the upstream sector i. The elasticity θ determines the magnitude of this effect.

On an algebraic level, equation (2.13) closely resembles a structural gravity equation in international trade, with intermediate input expenditure shares replacing trade shares, and contracting frictions dni replacing iceberg trade costs. This is the result of modeling the out-sourcing decision in a similar way to Eaton and Kortum’s way of modeling the international sourcing decision, and simplifies the quantitative evaluation of the model. In section 4 I use equation (2.13) to estimate the key parameters, including θ, and use these estimates to study the importance of costly contract enforcement for aggregate productivity and welfare.

I now proceed to closing the model. Intermediaries make profits due to the fact that they have monopoly power for their variety. Aggregate profits are

Π =X n X i Πni = X n X i  1 −σn− 1 σn 1 dni  Xni. (2.14)

The markets for sectoral output clear pici+



(Xni− Πni) = Xi, i = 1, . . . , N. (2.15)

An equilibrium is then a vector of sectoral price functions (pn(w))n=1,...,N that satisfies (2.12). Given the sectoral prices, all other endogenous variables can be directly calculated: intermediate input shares (Xni/Xn)n,ifrom (2.13), and profits Π and gross output levels (Xn)n=1,...,N from the linear system (2.14) and (2.15), where consumption levels are ci = ηi(wL + Π) /pi. Regarding


equilibrium existence and uniqueness, we obtain: Proposition 4 Under constant returns to scale, P

iγni = 1 for all n, the equilibrium exists and is unique.

The proof is straightforward: since ∂ log pn/∂ log pi = Xni/Xn, and ∃ x < 1 such that P

iXni/Xn < x for all n, the function defined by the right-hand side of (2.12) is a contraction mapping and has a unique fixed point.


Reduced-form Empirical Evidence

In this section I present empirical evidence that is consistent with the model’s qualitative predictions. To do that, I exploit cross-country variation in intermediate input expenditure shares, enforcement costs, and variation across sector-pairs in the degree to which they rely on formal enforcement. Having support for the model’s qualitative predications, I will then turn to the quantitative importance of contracting frictions for outsourcing and welfare by structurally estimating the model from Section 2.

To empirically operationalize the model, I here state a corollary to Proposition 3.

Corollary 5 For sufficiently high relationship-specificity 1 − ωni, sector n’s expenditure share on intermediary inputs from sector i is strictly decreasing in the enforcement costs δ.

The corollary directly follows from the fact that the expenditure share Xni/Xn is strictly de-creasing in dni (Proposition 3), and that dni is strictly increasing in δ for sufficiently low ωni (equation (2.9)). As explained in Section 2, when there is high relationship-specificity, the supplier and intermediary write contracts such that the suppliers outside option in ex-post bar-gaining is based on a threat to go to court, rather than a threat to revert production and sell it elsewhere. In these cases, the better the courts work the smaller the inefficiency and the larger the quantity supplied. This results in firms being more willing to outsource their production, and hence a higher intermediate input expenditure share.

In this section I bring Corollary 5 to the data by estimating the following reduced-form regression: Xnic Xc n = αni+ αci + αcn+ βδ c (1 − ωni) + εcni (3.1)

where Xnic is the total expenditure of sector n in country c on intermediate inputs from sector i, both domestically and internationally sourced; Xc

n is the gross output of industry n in country c; δc is a country-level measure of enforcement cost; 1 − ωni is the dependence on formal enforcement, such as what would arise when inputs are relationship-specific; αni are sector-pair fixed effects; αc

i are upstream sector times country fixed effects, and αcn are downstream sector times country fixed effects. In this equation, the expenditure share on intermediate inputs is a function of an interaction of a sector-pair characteristic (relationship-specificity) with a country characteristic (enforcement costs), as well as characteristics of the upstream and downstream


sectors in the country, and sector-pair characteristics that are invariant across countries. A negative value for β implies that a worsening of formal contract enforcement has particularly adverse effects on outsourcing in sector pairs characterized by high relationship-specificity, as predicted by Corollary 5. Equation (3.1) exploits variation in bilateral expenditure shares across countries, controlling for factors that affect the expenditure shares on the upstream side (such as sectoral productivity levels, skill and capital endowments, land and natural resources, but also institutional and policy factors such as subsidies, access to external financing, and import tariffs, or even measurement problems associated with particular inputs) and downstream side (firm scale, taxes).

Equation (3.1) is similar to the functional form used by Rajan and Zingales (1998) and subsequent papers, who explain sector-level variables using an interaction of a country-specific variable with a sector-country-specific variable. This literature typically goes to great lengths to try to control for the plethora of confounding factors that co-vary with the interaction term. Still, some of these factors may be left unaccounted, or badly proxied, for. My specification improves on this by exploiting variation across countries and bilateral sector pairs. This allows me to include upstream sector-country level fixed effects, thereby controlling for unobserved heterogeneity in the upstream sectors.



Intermediate input expenditure shares I use cross-country data on intermediate input expenditure from the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) database, version 8 (Narayanan et al., 2012). It contains input-output tables on 109 countries, from varying years ranging from the beginning of the 1990’s to mid-2000. These tables typically originate from national statistical sources, but have been harmonized by GTAP to make them comparable across countries. A notable quality of this dataset is that it includes many developing countries, for which industry-level data is typically scarce. The tables cover domestic and import expenditure for 56 sectors, which I aggregate up to 35 sectors that roughly correspond to two-digit sectors in ISIC Revision 3. 25 Table 1 contains summary statistics on expenditure shares at the country level.

Enforcement cost The World Bank Doing Business project provides country-level informa-tion on the monetary cost and time necessary to enforce a ficinforma-tional supplier contract in a local civil court. The contract is assumed to govern the sale of goods between a buyer and a seller in the country’s largest business city. The value of the sale is 200% of the country’s income per capita. The monetary cost is the total cost that the plaintiff (who is assumed to be the seller) must advance to enforce the contract in a court, and is measured as a fraction of the value of

25There is a large related literature in industrial organization that measures the degree of vertical integration as

the fraction of value added in gross output (see Adleman, 1955, Levy, 1985, Holmes, 1999, and also Macchiavello, 2012). My measure is similar, but distinguishes between intermediate inputs from different sectors. Furthermore, my data for intermediate input shares directly map into the theoretical counterpart in the model. I discuss concerns regarding the observability of firm boundaries in section 3.3.


the claim. It includes court fees, fees for expert witnesses, attorney fees, and any costs that the seller must advance to enforce the judgment though a sale of the buyer’s assets. The time until enforcement is measured from the point where the seller decides to initiate litigation, to the point where the judgment is enforced, i.e. the payments are received. I construct a total cost measure – again, as a fraction of the value of the claim – by adding the interest foregone during the proceedings, assuming a three percent interest rate:26

δc= (monetary cost, in pct)c+ 0.03 (time until enforcement, years)c.

I use the cost measures for the year 2005, or, depending on availability, the closest available year to 2005. Whenever δc exceeds one, I set it equal to one. The resulting measure is weakly negatively correlated with the economy’s overall intermediate input share (Figure 2).

While no measure of institutional quality is without drawbacks, there are two reasons why this particular measure lends itself very well to my purposes: firstly, it has a quantitative interpretation, and can be directly used as the parameter δ of the contracting game; secondly, it is not based on observed litigation, and hence does not suffer from a potential bias due to the use of informal contracts when enforcement costs are too high.

Dependence on Enforcement Recall that in the model, the more relationship-specific is the good exchanged between the sectors, the more the parties rely on formal contract enforcement to minimize distortions. In reality, relationship-specific investment may not be the only reason for having to rely on court enforcement: the presence of repeated interaction and relational contracts may allow trading partners to overcome hold-up problems without the involvement of courts. Hence, if enforcement costs are the same across sectors, the prevalence of litigation should be informative about the buyer and seller’s dependence on enforcement instutions: high rates of litigation imply that the scope for hold-up is large (be it though high relationship-specificity or the absence of relational contracts), and these are exactly the situations where enforcement costs – and the quality of legal instutions in general – matter.27

I therefore construct a measure of “enforcement-intensity,” i.e. the frequency with which firms from a particular sector-pair resolve conflicts in court, for one particular country where

26The expression is the proportional cost associated with a linear approximation of v(1−monetary cost,

pct)/(1+discount rate)(time, yrs), where v is a future payment. I obtain very similar results when using an eight

percent interest rate instead of three percent.

27Note that in my model the two parties do not actually go to court, but settle in order to avoid the enforcement

costs. This is a result of my contracting game being entirely deterministic: if the outcome of the enforcement is known in advance, there is no point in actually going to court. It would be straightforward to extend the game to a setting where, in some cases, the parties do actually end up in court; however, the resulting friction would then be stochastic and it would be impossible to integrate the contracting into the general-equilibrium macromodel. One simple way to get the prediction of more litigation for higher degree of relationship-specificity would be to change the model by assuming that (1) parties cannot settle outside of court with an exogenous probability, and (2) the possibility of an ex-ante transfer from the supplier to the intermediary, so that an

informal contract (q∗ = 0 and M = 0) is optimal in the case when relationship-specificity is low. Then, the

threat of litigation only occurs in the case of seller breach, and higher relationship-specificity is associated with a higher prevalence of litigation.


enforcement costs are low, so that enforcement costs themselves are not censoring the prevalence of litigation in an asymmetric way across industries.28 In particular, using data for the United States, for each pair of sectors I observe the number of court cases over a fixed period of time. My data come from the LexisLibrary database provided by LexisNexis. It contains cases from US federal and state courts. I take all cases between January 1990 and December 2012 that are related to contract law, ignoring appeal and higher courts, and match the plaintiff and defendant’s names to the Orbis database of firms, provided by Bureau Van Dijk.29 Or-bis contains the 4-digit SIC industry classification of firms; I thus know in which sectors the plaintiffs and defendants are active in. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (1996) documents that in US state court cases related to the sale of goods or provision of services between two non-individuals, the seller is more than seven times more likely to be the plaintiff. I thus assign the plaintiff to the upstream industry. To obtain the likelihood of litigation between the two sectors, I divide the observed number of cases by a proxy for the number of buyer-seller re-lationships. If each downstream sector firm has exactly one supplier in each upstream sector, the correct way to normalize is to use the number of firms in the downstream sector. This yields a measure z(1)ni. Since the presence of more firms in the upstream sector may mean that there are more buyer-seller relationships, I construct an alternative measure where I divide the number of cases by the geometric mean of the number of firms active in the upstream and downstream industries, yielding a measure zni(2).30,31 I interpret these two measures as related to the likelihood of litigation, and hence enforcement-intensity, for each pair of sectors. Table 2 shows summary statistics for zni(1) and zni(2).

zni(1) = (# cases between sectors i and n)

(# firms in sector n) , z (2) ni =

(# cases between sectors i and n) p(# firms in sector i) (# firms in sector n)


My measure is conceptually different from existing measures of relationship-specificity/enforcement-intensity along three important dimensions.32 First, the existing measures are only available for

28It may seem at first glance that the prevalence of litigation across sectors in each country would be more

suitable to measure the dependence on legal institutions. The model (and plenty of anecdotal evidence),

however, suggest that the decision to use formal contracts in the first place depends on enforcement costs; hence, country-specific litigiosity ratios would generally understate the true dependence on legal institutions

(and in an asymmetric way across sectors) and would lead to biased coefficient estimates. Of course, by

constructing enforcement-intensity indices for one country only, I assume that all non-institutional factors that affect the dependence on court enforcement are constant across countries – an assumption that is implicitly made in Rajan and Zingales (2007), Nunn (2007), and the vast majority of existing work on the topic. I will argue below that even though this assumption may be violated, it is unlikely to drive the regression results.

29See Appendix D for details on the construction of matches and matching statistics.

30I use the number of firms in Orbis. The results are extremely similar when using the number of firms from

the Census Bureau’s Statistics on U.S. Businesses instead.

31Results are robust to using the number cases divided by the number of upstream sector firms as a measure

of enforcement-intensity.

32There are three existing measures of enforcement-intensity (sometimes directly interpreted as

relationship-specificity). Nunn (2007) uses the fraction of a sector’s inputs that are traded on an organized exchange, Levchenko (2007) uses the Herfindahl index of input shares, and Bernard et al. (2010) measure contractability as the weighted share of wholesalers in overall importers.


physical goods, whereas my measures cover services sectors as well. Second, the existing mea-sures depend on intermediate input share data or assume that input shares are constant across countries. In section 3.2 I document that input shares vary sharply across countries, which ren-ders the existing measures inapplicable to the study of cross-country input use patterns. Third, and most relevant to my identification strategy, my measure varies across bilateral sector-pairs, instead of being associated with the upstream sector. Given that the sectors in my dataset are fairly broad, it is likely that the products being sold to one sector are quite different to the ones sold to other sectors, and that the form of interaction varies with the trading partner. The fact that my measure is sector-pair-specific is key to my identification strategy, as it allows me to include upstream sector-country fixed effects to control for unobserved sector characteristics like productivity.

Table 3 shows the ranking of upstream sectors by the average degree of enforcement-intensity, as measured by zni(2) (the ranking for z(1)ni is very similar). Services sectors are on average more enforcement-intensive than manufacturing sectors, which are in turn more enforcement-intensive than raw materials-producing sectors. A similar ranking is usually re-garded to apply to the degree of relationship-specificity of inputs (Monteverde and Teece, 1982, Masten 1984, Nunn, 2007). Once a service has been performed, it cannot be sold to a third party, thus the scope for hold-up should be high. On the other end of the spectrum, raw ma-terials have low depreciability and may be readily obtained through organized markets, thus there is relatively little scope for hold-up. Hence, my measure is consistent with the view that enforcement-intensity is (at least to some extent) stemming from the degree of relationship-specificity of the input.


Cross-country Dispersion in Input-Output Tables

Table 4 shows the dispersion of intermediate input shares at the two-digit level from their respective means. To obtain the numbers in the first part of the table, I first calculated the standard deviation of the intermediate input shares for each sector-pair, and then took averages of these standard deviations. The average dispersion of expenditure shares across all sector-pairs is 2.3 percentage points. For services-producing upstream sectors, the dispersion is significantly higher (at the 1% level) than for sectors that produce physical goods. Most striking, however, is the fact that here is a sizeable number of sector-pairs for which the cross-country dispersion in input expenditure shares is high. The second part of Table 4 shows that for roughly 5 percent of sector pairs, the standard deviation is greater than 10 percentage points.

For which inputs is the cross-country dispersion in expenditure shares particularly large? Figure 3 shows for every upstream sector the expenditure share on this sector, averaged across downstream sectors. I use unweighted averages, to make sure the cross-country variation in the resulting input shares is not due to a different sectoral composition. The left panel shows that the dispersion is higher for inputs with higher average expenditure shares. Still, even in log-deviations there is considerable heterogeneity across inputs. Among the inputs with



Related subjects :