Yin Fan
Yin Fan, in a joint study with Kai-Uwe Kuhn and Francine Lafontaine, has investigated how the financial constraints of agents (franchisees) affect the behaviour of principals (franchisors) in the context of franchising. They have developed an empirical model of franchising, starting with a principal-agent framework that emphasises the role of franchisees’ collateral from an incentive perspective. They estimate the determinants of a chain’s use of franchising and growth decisions using data on franchised chains and data on local macroeconomic conditions. In particular, they use collateralisable housing wealth as an inverse measure of the average financial constraints of potential franchisees.
Yin Fan’s main research interest is empirical industrial organisation. Some of her research focuses on firms’ endogenous product choice and entry decisions. For example, her paper, “Ownership Consolidation and Product Characteristics: A Study of the U.S. Daily Newspaper Market” (forthcoming in the American Economic Review), studies the effect of ownership consolidation on newspaper characteristics as well as newspaper subscription prices and advertising rates. She develops a structural model of newspaper markets to analyse the effects of ownership consolidation, taking into account not only firms’ price adjustments but also the adjustments in newspaper characteristics. She has determined that ignoring adjustments of product characteristics causes substantial differences in the estimated effects of mergers.
Ying Fan is an assistant professor in the economics department at the University of Michigan, having been awarded a PhD in economics from Yale University in 2009. She was a visiting assistant professor at Harvard University in the 2012–2013 academic year.
During her visit at CESifo, she plans to continue work on her franchising paper and is looking forward to interacting with CESifo researchers.