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Working Paper
Relative price dispersion: evidence and theory
Menzio, Guido; Rudanko, Leena; Kaplan, Greg; Trachter, Nicholas (2016-02-29)
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 Papers , Paper 16-6

Working Paper
Slow Convergence in Economies with Organization Capital
Luttmer, Erzo G. J. (2018-01-19)
Most firms begin very small, and large firms are the result of typically decades of persistent growth. This growth can be understood as the result of some form of capital accumulation-organization capital. In the US, the distribution of firm size k has a right tail only slightly thinner than 1/k. This means that most capital accumulation must be accounted for by incumbent firms. This paper describes a range of circumstances in which this implies aggregate convergence rates that are only about half of what they are in the standard Cass-Koopmans economy. Through the lens of the models described ...
Working Papers , Paper 748

Journal Article
Changes in the distribution of banking offices
Canner, Glenn B.; Calem, Paul S.; Bostic, Raphael W.; Avery, Robert B. (1997-09)
The past twenty years have been marked by major structural and regulatory changes in the banking industry. This article explores the relationships between these changes and the distribution of "brick and mortar" banking offices between 1975 and 1995. The analysis explores how population shifts, deregulation, and mergers, acquisitions, and failures may have influenced changes in the number and location of banking offices. Special attention is given to changes in banking office distributions across neighborhoods grouped by the median income of their residents and their central city, suburban, ...
Federal Reserve Bulletin , Volume 83 , Issue Sep

Report
Pricing Inequality
Mongey, Simon; Waugh, Michael E. (2025-01-31)
This paper studies household inequality and product market power in dynamic, general equilibrium. In our model, households’ price elasticities of demand endogenously vary with wealth. Heterogeneous firms set their price as oligopolistic competitors given the endogenous distribution of demand. A firm’s market power varies with the distribution of demand as households with different elasticities sort into high- and low-price varieties. Under standard preferences, larger firms’ products are more appealing, sell at higher prices, to more households, and a relatively richer customer base, ...
Staff Report , Paper 664

Working Paper
Common Ownership Does Not Have Anti-Competitive Effects in the Airline Industry
Gerardi, Kristopher S.; Dennis, Patrick; Schenone, Carola (2019-07-01)
Institutional investors often own significant equity in firms that compete in the same product market. These "common owners" may have an incentive to coordinate the actions of firms that would otherwise be competing rivals, leading to anti-competitive pricing. This paper uses data on airline ticket prices to test whether common owners induce anti-competitive pricing behavior. We find little evidence to support such a hypothesis, and show that the positive relationship between average ticket prices and a commonly used measure of common ownership previously documented in the literature is ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2019-15

Working Paper
The Roles of Price Points and Menu Costs in Price Rigidity
Knotek, Edward S. (2019-11-12)
Macroeconomic models often generate nominal price rigidity via menu costs. This paper provides empirical evidence that treating menu costs as a structural explanation for sticky prices may be spurious. Using scanner data, I note two empirical facts: (1) price points, embodied in nine-ending prices, account for approximately two-thirds of prices; and (2) at the conclusion of sales, post-sale prices return to their pre-sale levels more than three-fourths of the time. I construct a model that nests roles for menu costs and price points and estimate model variants. Excluding the two facts yields ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-23

Working Paper
The time-varying price of financial intermediation in the mortgage market
Lo, Stephanie; Willen, Paul S.; Fuster, Andreas (2017-01-01)
The U.S. mortgage market links homeowners with savers all over the world. In this paper, we ask how much of the flow of money from savers to borrowers actually goes to the intermediaries that facilitate these transactions. Based on a new methodology and a new administrative dataset, we find that the price of intermediation, measured as a fraction of the loan amount at origination, is large?142 basis points on average over the 2008?2014 period. At daily frequencies, intermediaries pass on the price changes in the secondary market to borrowers in the primary market almost completely. At monthly ...
Working Papers , Paper 16-28

Working Paper
A Market Interpretation of Treatment Effects
Minton, Robert; Mulligan, Casey B. (2024-12-20)
Markets, likened to an invisible hand, often appear to contradict econometric assumptions that rule out spillovers of one person’s treatment on another’s outcomes. This paper provides a simple statistical framework highlighting that controls are indirectly affected by the treatment through the market. Further, the effect of the treatment on the treated reveals only part of the consequence for the treated of treating the entire market. When combined with economic theory, our framework leads to a new application of Marshall’s Laws of Derived Demand that relates econometric estimates of ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2024-096

Working Paper
Misallocation, informality, and human capital: understanding the role of institutions
Senkal, Asli; D'Erasmo, Pablo; Moscoso Boedo, Herman J. (2014-03-24)
Accepted for publication, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control The aim of this paper is to quantify the role of formal-sector institutions in shaping the demand for human capital and the level of informality. We propose a firm dynamics model where firms face capital market imperfections and costs of operating in the formal sector. Formal firms have a larger set of production opportunities and the ability to employ skilled workers, but informal firms can avoid the costs of formalization. These firm-level distortions give rise to endogenous formal and informal sectors and, more importantly, ...
Working Papers , Paper 14-11

Working Paper
Diverging Trends in National and Local Concentration
Rossi-Hansberg, Esteban; Sarte, Pierre-Daniel G.; Trachter, Nicholas (2018-09-24)
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 ...
Working Paper , Paper 18-15

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