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Working Paper
Macroeconomic Implications of Uniform Pricing
We compile a new database of grocery prices in Argentina. We find uniform pricing both within and across regions—i.e., prices almost do not vary within stores of a chain. In line with uniform pricing, prices in stores of chains operating in one region react to changes in regional employment, while prices in multi-region chains do not. Using a quantitative regional model with multi-region firms and uniform pricing, we find a one-half smaller elasticity of prices to a regional than an aggregate shock. This result highlights that some caution may be necessary when using regional shocks to ...
Working Paper
Inflation and the Gig Economy: Have the Rise of Online Retailing and Self-Employment Disrupted the Phillips Curve?
During the recovery from the Great Recession, inflation did not reach the central bank?s 2 percent objective as quickly as many models had predicted. This coincided with increases in online shopping, which arguably made retail markets more contestable and damped retail inflation. This hypothesis is tested using data on the online share of retail sales, which are incorporated into an econometric model. Results imply that the rise of online retail has flattened the Phillips Curve, reducing the sensitivity of inflation to unemployment rate changes. Improvement in fit from just including the ...
Working Paper
Embedded Supervision: How to Build Regulation into Blockchain Finance
The spread of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in finance could help to improve the efficiency and quality of supervision. This paper makes the case for embedded supervision, i.e., a regulatory framework that provides for compliance in tokenized markets to be automatically monitored by reading the market?s ledger, thus reducing the need for firms to actively collect, verify and deliver data. After sketching out a design for such schemes, the paper explores the conditions under which distributed ledger data might be used to monitor compliance. To this end, a decentralized market is modelled ...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic Implications of Uniform Pricing
We compile a new database of grocery prices in Argentina, with over 9 million observations per day. We find uniform pricing both within and across regions—i.e., product prices almost do not vary within stores of a chain. Uniform pricing implies that prices would not change with regional conditions or shocks, particularly so if chains operate in several regions. We confirm this hypothesis using employment data. While prices in stores of chains operating almost exclusively in one region do react to changes in regional employment, stores of chains that operate in many regions do not. Finally, ...
Working Paper
Firm Networks and Asset Returns
This paper argues that changes in the propagation of idiosyncratic shocks along firm networks are important to understanding variations in asset returns. When calibrated to match key features of supplier-customer networks in the United States, an equilibrium model in which investors have recursive preferences and firms are interlinked via enduring relationships generates long-run consumption risks. Additionally, the model matches cross-sectional patterns of portfolio returns sorted by network centrality, a feature unaccounted for by standard asset pricing models.
Working Paper
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and Bank Branching Patterns
This paper examines the relationship between the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and bank branching patterns, measured by the risk of branch closure and the net loss of branches at the neighborhood level, in the aftermath of Great Recession. Between 2009 and 2017, there was a larger decline in the number of bank branches in lower-income neighborhoods than in more affluent ones, raising concerns about access to mainstream financial services. However, once we control for supply and demand factors that influence bank branching decisions, we find generally consistent evidence that the CRA is ...
Working Paper
Beyond the Doomsday Economics of “Proof-of-Work” in Cryptocurrencies
This paper discusses the economics of how Bitcoin achieves data immutability, and thus payment finality, via costly computations, i.e., ?proof-of-work.? Further, it explores what the future might hold for cryptocurrencies modelled on this type of consensus algorithm. The conclusions are, first, that Bitcoin counterfeiting via ?double-spending? attacks is inherently profitable, making payment finality based on proof-of-work extremely expensive. Second, the transaction market cannot generate an adequate level of ?mining? income via fees as users free-ride on the fees of other transactions in a ...
Working Paper
Innovation, Deregulation, and the Life Cycle of a Financial Service Industry
This paper examines innovation, deregulation, and fi rm dynamics over the life cycle of the U.S. ATM and debit card industry. In doing so, we construct a dynamic equilibrium model to study how a major product innovation (introducing the new debit card function) interacted with banking deregulation drove the industry shakeout. Calibrating the model to a novel data set on ATM network entry,exit, size, and product offerings shows that our theory fits the quantitative pattern of the industry well. The model also allows us to conduct counterfactual analyses to evaluate the respective roles that ...
Discussion Paper
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and Bank Branching Patterns
This paper examines the relationship between the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and bank branching patterns, measured by the risk of branch closure and the net loss of branches at the neighborhood level, in the aftermath of Great Recession. Between 2009 and 2017, there was a larger decline in the number of bank branches in lower-income neighborhoods than in more affluent ones, raising concerns about access to mainstream financial services. However, once we control for supply and demand factors that influence bank branching decisions, we find generally consistent evidence that the CRA is ...
Working Paper
Estimating the Competitive Effects of Common Ownership
If managers maximize the payoffs of their shareholders rather than firm profits, then it may be anticompetitive for a shareholder to own competing firms. This is because a manager?s objective function may place weight on profits of competitors who are held by the same shareholder. Recent research found evidence that common ownership by diversified institutional investors is anticompetitive by showing that prices in the airline and banking industries are related to generalized versions of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) that account for common ownership. In this paper we propose an ...