Search Results
Working Paper
Relative price dispersion: evidence and theory
REVISED: 8/1/18: We use a large data set on retail pricing to document that a sizable portion of the cross-sectional variation in the price at which the same good trades in the same period and in the same market is due to the fact that stores that are, on average, equally expensive set persistently different prices for the same good. We refer to this phenomenon as relative price dispersion. We argue that relative price dispersion stems from sellers? attempts to discriminate between high-valuation buyers who need to make all of their purchases in the same store and low-valuation buyers who are ...
Working Paper
Commodity money with frequent search
A prominent feature of the Kiyotaki and Wright (1989) model of commodity money is the multiplicity of dynamic equilibria. We show that the frequency of search is strongly related to the extent of multiplicity. To isolate the role of frequency of search in generating multiplicity, we (i) vary the frequency of search without changing the frequency of finding a trading partner and (ii) focus on symmetric dynamic equilibria, a class for which we can sharply characterize several features of the set of equilibria. For any finite frequency of search this class retains much of the multiplicity. For ...
Briefing
Why Don't Low-Income Countries Adopt More Productive Technologies?
Researchers at UCLA, the Richmond Fed and Washington University in St. Louis have developed a theory of economic development in which complementarity in firms' technology-adoption decisions can substantially amplify the negative impacts of distortions in the economy and play an important role in explaining income differences across countries. By integrating theories that separately emphasize the roles of coordination failures and distortions, their unified framework shows that reducing distortions within "big push" regions could unleash massive economic growth.
Working Paper
Large and Small Sellers: A Theory of Equilibrium Price Dispersion with Sequential Search
The paper studies equilibrium pricing in a product market for an indivisible good where buyers search for sellers. Buyers search sequentially for sellers but do not meet every seller with the same probability. Specifically, a fraction of the buyers' meetings lead to one particular large seller, while the remaining meetings lead to one of a continuum of small sellers. In this environment, the small sellers would like to set a price that makes the buyers indifferent between purchasing the good and searching for another seller. The large seller would like to price the small sellers out of the ...
Working Paper
Diverging Trends in National and Local Concentration
Using U.S. NETS data, we present evidence that the positive trend observed in national product-market concentration between 1990 and 2014 becomes a negative trend when we focus on measures of local concentration. We document diverging trends for several geographic definitions of local markets. SIC 8 industries with diverging trends are pervasive across sectors. In these industries, top firms have contributed to the amplification of both trends. When a top firm opens a plant, local concentration declines and remains lower for at least seven years. Our findings, therefore, reconcile the ...
Briefing
Buyers' Ability and Willingness to Shop Around: An Explanation for Price Dispersion
For many years, economists have observed substantial and pervasive price dispersion ? wide variations in price for the same product. Some economists have attributed price dispersion to "ignorance in the market," a lack of information among buyers and sellers. More recently, economists at the Richmond Fed and the University of Pennsylvania have developed a model that combines price dispersion theory with intertemporal price discrimination theory to suggest that buyers' differing ability and willingness to shop around might explain price dispersion.
Briefing
How Well Do Firms Retain Customers After Price Increases?
Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance developed a model that studies the optimal price setting of a firm. Using microdata from the U.S. retail industry, we document that customer turnover responds to price changes. Therefore, to keep customers, firms do not completely pass productivity shocks through to their prices. The price pass-through is heterogeneous across firms, with the most productive firms passing through more.
Briefing
Diverging Trends in Market Concentration
Researchers at the University of Chicago and the Richmond Fed uncover a paradoxical trend of rising national market concentration and falling local concentration across major economic sectors. Top firms — often thought to displace local businesses — are found to instead accelerate this divergence by enhancing (rather than stifling) local competition upon entry. This challenges prevailing narratives that top firms wield the market power to negatively impact consumer welfare by geographically expanding.
Journal Article
The Dropout Option in a Simple Model of College Education
We present a simple dynamic model of education where students are uncertain about their ability to accumulate human capital in college. While enrolled in college, students are faced with exams that motivate them to update their beliefs. The process of belief-updating implies that some students will optimally choose to drop out. The model that we build is highly tractable and allows for close-form solutions for many objects of interest, so that calibrating the model is a straightforward exercise. We use a calibrated version of the model to gauge the importance of the dropout option in shaping ...