We provide the first direct estimates of distribution expenses incurred by manufacturing plants and assess their importance for aggregate output. Using a novel measure from the Indian Annual Survey of Industries, we document three key facts: (1) distribution expenses are large – they amount to...

Firms invest heavily in customer capital, and such investment is a main source of intangible capital value. This study measures investment in customer capital using sales and marketing expense from income statements, information on salaries paid to workers in sales and marketing, and text from...

This paper studies the role played by the distribution sector in shaping the behavior of the real exchange rate during exchange-rate-based-stabilizations. We use data for the U.S. and Argentina to document the importance of distribution margins in retail prices and disaggregated price data to...

We provide the first direct estimates of distribution expenses incurred by manufacturing plants and assess their importance for aggregate output. Using a novel measure from the Indian Annual Survey of Industries, we document three key facts: (1) distribution expenses are large - they amount to...

Marketing and distribution expenses are responsible for about a third of the cost of active management in the mutual fund industry. We develop and estimate a structural model of mutual fund marketing with learning about unobserved skill and costly investor search. Our estimates suggest that...

Is the variation in bilateral trade flows across countries primarily due to differences in the number of exporting firms (the extensive margin) or in the average size of an exporter (the intensive margin)? And how does this affect the estimation and quantitative implications of the Melitz (2003)...