On January 1, 1998 Marathon and Ashland combined their refining and marketing assets in a joint venture which was unchallenged by U.S. antitrust authorities. Because there were no divestitures, the transaction led to a significant increase in concentration in the wholesale and retail sale of...

In the past decade, many of the world's largest financial exchanges have converted from mutual, not-for-profit organizations to publicly-traded, for-profit firms. In most cases, these exchanges have substantial responsibilities with respect to enforcing various regulations that protect investors...

This paper analyzes corporate responses to the liability risk arising from its workers' exposure to newly identified carcinogens. We find that firms, especially those with weak balance sheets, tend to respond to such risks by acquiring large, unrelated businesses with relatively high operating...

This paper examines whether debt financing can undermine a supermarket firm's incentive to provide product quality. In the supermarket industry, product availability is an important measure of a retailer's quality. Using U.S. consumer price index microdata to track inventory shortfalls, I find...

I analyze the strategic use of debt financing to improve a firm's bargaining position with an important supplier -- organized labor. Because maintaining high levels of corporate liquidity can encourage workers to raise their wage demands, a firm with external finance constraints has an incentive...

This paper develops a model of competition among multiproduct retailers that is consistent with observed pricing regularities, such as the facts that virtually all products have large mass points in their price distributions and that most deviations fall below these mass points. The basis of the...

Recent theoretical research on retail pricing dynamics provides an explanation of why retailers periodically put items on sale, even when their costs are unchanged. The authors extend this research to show that more popular items (i.e., those that appeal to a wide range of consumers) are more...

We examine retail price variation across a range of goods and regions of the United States. We find that the typical grocery product has a regular price and stays at that price at least 50% of the time, and that most deviations from that regular price are downward. Temporary discounts or sales,...

Two common features of retailing are that each retailer sells many different products, and that pricing strategies differ across products. This paper extends previous work on single-product retailer competition to a multiproduct setting. Specifically, we derive equilibrium pricing strategies for...