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Report
Appendix for How Exporters Grow
No abstract
Report
How Exporters Grow
We show that after firms enter new export markets, there are striking dynamics of quantities, but no dynamics of prices, controlling for both costs and selection. This points to an important role for demand in the growth of successful exporters, and to a nonprice mechanism through which quantity demanded grows. A model where firms engage in costly investment in customer base through marketing and advertising, and learn about their idiosyncratic demand, can qualitatively match these facts, along with a declining exit hazard. We structurally estimate the model and find that costs of adjusting ...
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.
Working Paper
Price Setting with Customer Capital: Sales, Teasers, and Rigidity
This paper studies price setting in an equilibrium search model of frictional product markets with long-term customer relationships. The theory gives rise to temporary sales when pricing is constrained to be anonymous across a firm’s customer base. Equilibrium prices are inefficiently high, giving rise to overselling and excess trade, and the emergence of sale pricing can improve allocations by limiting this overselling. Pricing is also characterized by an asymmetry involving a stable regular price and variable sale price when firms face idiosyncratic shocks. Absent anonymous pricing, the ...