We document a change in household shopping behavior during the Great Recession. Households purchased more on sale, larger sizes and generic products, increased coupon usage, and shopping at discount stores. We estimate that the returns to these shopping activities declined during the recession...

Empirically studying dynamic competition in oligopoly markets requires dealing with large states spaces and tackling difficult computational problems, while handling heterogeneity and multiple equilibria. In this paper, we discuss some of the ways recent work in Industrial Organization has dealt...

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy on the expenditure of households of different ages using micro data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey. I find that contractionary monetary policy shocks reduce the expenditure of young households by significantly more than older...

We study the nature of peer effects in the market for new cell phones. Our analysis builds on de-identified data from Facebook that combine information on social networks with information on users’ cell phone models. To identify peer effects, we use variation in friends’ new phone...

We introduce a new measure of social connectedness between U.S. county-pairs, as well as between U.S. counties and foreign countries. Our measure, which we call the "Social Connectedness Index" (SCI), is based on the number of friendship links on Facebook, the world's largest online social...

This paper assesses the effects of demographic changes on the transmission of monetary policy to consumption. First, I provide empirical estimates of age-specific consumption elasticities to interest rate shocks. The consumption of the young is significantly more responsive than the national...

This paper studies how the impact of monetary policy depends on the distribution of savings from refinancing mortgages. We show that the efficacy of monetary policy is state dependent, varying in a systematic way with the pool of potential savings from refinancing. We construct a quantitative...

In this paper, we provide direct evidence on the behavior of markups in the retail sector across space and time. Markups are measured using gross margins. We consider three levels of aggregation: the retail sector as a whole, the firm level, and the product level. We find that: (1) markups are...