This study introduces the urbanicity index of employment. Unlike traditional measures of urbanization (e.g., urbanization rate), the urbanicity index is distance-based and accounts for the scale aspect as well as the concentration aspect of urbanization. The concentration aspect can be...

The authors develop a dynamic approach to measuring the evolution of comparative brand premium, an important component of brand equity. A comparative brand premium is defined as the pairwise price difference between two products being identical in every respect but brand. The model is based on...

New and old products differ in two respects: quality and newness. Whereas a higher quality of a new product always benefits consumers, the newness itself benefits some consumers, but not others, and for some, it is even a disadvantage. We capture these features in a Hotelling model of...

New and old products differ in two respects: quality and newness. Whereas a higher quality of a new product always benefits consumers, the newness itself benefits some consumers, but not others, and for some, it is even a disadvantage. We capture these features in a Hotelling model of...

The authors develop a dynamic approach to measuring the evolution of comparative brand premium, an important component of brand equity. A comparative brand premium is defined as the pairwise price difference between two products being identical in every respect but brand. The model is based on...

When some industries are overrepresented in urban areas (urban concentration), some other industries must be overrepresented in rural areas (rural concentration). Existing measures of concentration do not distinguish between these different types of concentration. Instead, they rank industries...

Due to outdated weighting information, a Laspeyres-based Consumer Price Index (CPI) is prone to accumulating upward bias. Therefore, the present study introduces and examines simple and transparent revision approaches that retrospectively address the source of the bias. They provide a consistent...

Surveys of cartel proceedings reveal that illegal cartels usually (1) attempt to minimize the risk of detection, (2) achieve merely imperfect levels of collusion, (3) compete against some fringe firms, and (4) adjust to market entries and exits. By contrast, existing oligopoly models of...

A chained price index is said to suffer from chain drift bias if it indicates an overall price change, even though the prices and quantities in the current period have reverted back to their levels of the base period. The empirical relevance of this bias is well documented in studies that apply...

Textbooks of macroeconomics regularly remind their readers that they should not interpret the macroeconomic price variable as some sort of average price. Instead it represents some price index indicating the average of the individual items' price changes between the period considered and some...