Search Results
Working Paper
Is Sales Tax Included in the Price? Consumer Inattention and Price Competition
Sales tax is generally not included in the advertised price quoted to consumers in the United States. In contrast, value added taxes (VAT) are embedded into the price in most other countries. This article investigates how the two different pricing structures and consumers' decision-making process affect the intensity of price competition. The two pricing structures yield identical market outcomes with fast-computing consumers who are willing and able to recompute the exact sales tax each time there is a price change. With slow-computing consumers, prices and profits are higher when sellers ...
Working Paper
A simple model of price dispersion
This article considers a simple stock-flow matching model with fully informed market participants. Unlike in the standard matching literature, prices are assumed to be set ex-ante. When sellers pre-commit themselves to sell their products at an advertised price, the unique equilibrium is characterized by price dispersion due to the idiosyncratic match payoffs (in a marketplace with full information). This provides new insights into the price dispersion literature, where price dispersion is commonly assumed to be generated by a costly search of uninformed buyers.
Working Paper
Self-confirming Price Dispersion in Monetary Economies
In a monetary economy, we show that price dispersion arises as an equilibrium outcome without the need for costly simultaneous search or any heterogeneity in preferences, production costs, or search technologies. A distribution of money holdings among buyers makes sellers indifferent across a set of posted prices, leading to a non-degenerate price distribution. This price distribution, in turn, makes buyers indifferent across a range of money balances, rationalizing the non-degenerate distribution of money holdings. We completely characterize the distribution of posted prices and money ...
Working Paper
Capacity Choice, Monetary Trade, and the Cost of Inflation
Firms often make production decisions before meeting a buyer. We incorporate this often-overlooked fact into an otherwise standard monetary search model and show that it has important implications for the set of equilibria, efficiency, and the cost of inflation. Our model features a strategic complementarity between the buyers' ex ante choice of money balances and sellers' ex ante choice of productive capacity. When resale value of unsold inventories is high, sellers carry excess capacity and the equilibrium is unique. But, when resale value is low, there is a continuum of equilibria, all of ...
Working Paper
Are Supply Networks Efficiently Resilient?
We show that supply networks are inefficiently, and insufficiently, resilient. Upstream firms can expand their production capacity to hedge againstsupply and demand shocks. But the social benefits of such investments arenot internalized due to market power and market incompleteness. Upstreamfirms under-invest in capacity and resilience, passing-on the costs to downstreamfirms, and drive trade excessively towards the spot markets. There isa wedge between the market solution and a constrained optimal benchmark,which persists even without rare and large shocks. Policies designed to incentivize ...
Working Paper
Asymmetric Information and the Death of ABS CDOs
A key feature of the 2007 financial crisis is that for many securities trading had ceased; where trading did occur, market prices were well below intrinsic values, especially for ABS CDOs. One explanation is that information had been asymmetric, with sellers having better information than buyers. We first show the information advantages sellers had over buyers in both the issuance of CDOs and, through vertical integration, performance of the CDO collateral that could well have disrupted trading after the onset of the crisis. Using a ?workhorse" model for pricing securities under asymmetric ...
Working Paper
Credit Misallocation and Macro Dynamics with Oligopolistic Financial Intermediaries
Bank market power shapes firm investment and financing dynamics and hence affects the transmission of macroeconomic shocks. Motivated by a secular increase in the concentration of the US banking industry, I study bank market power through the lens of a dynamic general equilibrium model with oligopolistic banks and heterogeneous firms. The lack of competition allows banks to price discriminate and charge firm-specific markups in excess of default premia. In turn, the cross-sectional dispersion of markups amplifies the impact of macroeconomic shocks. During a crisis, banks exploit their market ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Transmission, Bank Market Power, and Income Source
We provide empirical evidence on banks' market power in financial services and its implications for monetary policy transmission through deposit rates. Banks with market power in financial services charge higher fees for their service and also offer lower deposit rates with less pass-through from monetary policy. We argue that this is the result of product tying: consumers must open a deposit account to access a bank's financial services. We develop and calibrate a quantitative model of the U.S. banking industry where banks generate non-interest income from services in addition to a standard ...
Journal Article
Effects of Credit Supply on Unemployment and Income Inequality
The Great Recession, which was preceded by the Financial Crisis, resulted in higher unemployment and income inequality. We propose a simple model where firms producing varieties face labor-market frictions and credit constraints. In the model, tighter credit leads to lower output, a lower number of vacancies, and higher directed-search unemployment. If workers are more productive at higher levels of firm output, then a lower credit supply increases firm capital intensity, raises income inequality by increasing the rental of capital relative to the wage, and has an ambiguous effect on welfare. ...
Working Paper
Effects of Credit Supply on Unemployment and Inequality
The Great Recession, which was preceded by the financial crisis, resulted in higher unemployment and inequality. We propose a simple model where firms producing varieties face labor-market frictions and credit constraints. In the model, tighter credit leads to lower output, lower number of vacancies, and higher directed-search unemployment. Where workers are more productive at higher levels of firm output, lower credit supply increases firm capital intensity, raises inequality by increasing the rental of capital relative to the wage, and has an ambiguous effect on welfare. At initial high ...