This paper studies the economic effects of endorsements. In the publishing sector, endorsements from the Oprah Winfrey Book Club are found to be a business stealing form of advertising that raises title level sales without increasing the market size. The endorsements decrease aggregate adult...

We use broad-based yet detailed data from the economy's goods-producing sectors to investigate firms' ownership of production chains. It does not appear that vertical ownership is primarily used to facilitate transfers of goods along the production chain, as is often presumed: Roughly one-half...

Many jurisdictions around the world have deregulated utilities and opened retail markets to competition. However, inertial decisionmaking can diminish consumer benefits of retail competition. Using household-level data from the Texas residential electricity market, we document evidence of...

This paper explores the application of oblivious equilibrium to concentrated industries. We define an extended notion of oblivious equilibrium that we call partially oblivious equilibrium (POE) that allows for there to be a set of "dominant firms'', whose firm states are always monitored by...

Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within metropolitan areas, but the endogeneity of these measures bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near...

The 2010 Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission Horizontal Merger Guidelines lay out a new standard for assessing proposed mergers in markets with differentiated products. This new standard is based on a measure of ``upward pricing pressure,'' (UPP) and the calculation of a ``gross...

All-Units Discounts are vertical rebates in which a manufacturer pays a retailer a linear wholesale price up to a quantity threshold; beyond the threshold, the retailer receives a discount on all future and previous units. Such contracts, which are common in many industries, potentially have both...

Agents in two-sided matching games vary in characteristics that are unobservable in typical data on matching markets. We investigate the identification of the distribution of these unobserved characteristics using data on who matches with whom. The distribution of match-specific unobservables...

The theory of cost-shifting posits that nonprofit hospitals respond to negative financial shocks by raising prices for privately insured patients. We examine how hospitals responded to the sharp reductions in their endowments caused by the 2008 stock market collapse. We find that the average...

We investigate whether the first digit of an odometer reading is more salient to consumers than subsequent digits. We find that retail transaction prices and volumes of used vehicles drop discontinuously at 10,000-mile odometer thresholds, echoing effects found in the wholesale market by...