Retail expansion is led by multi-store firms, which often mix two organizational forms: franchised and company-owned outlets (“franchising decisions”). The authors examine whether strategic considerations in entry and expansion play a role in organizational-form decisions, such as...

Spatial competition among multi-store firms is ubiquitous in a wide range of retail industries. However, little is known about how those firms optimize their networks of stores after a merger due to the computational burden of solving for an equilibrium in store networks. This paper proposes an...

In this paper, we discuss the role that data processing and collection have for the measurement of misallocation. First, we turn to the raw self-reported data for the US, reflecting what can be found in most developing countries. In the raw data, measured misallocation (following Hsieh and...

Information frictions play a key role in an array of economic activities and are frequently incorporated into formal models as search costs. However, little is known about the underlying source of consumer search costs and how heterogeneous they are across consumers and markets. This paper...

We explain a puzzle from two recent meta-analyses that cover 25 countries and claim to show that inputs systematically move from higher-value to lower-value activities despite strong aggregate labor productivity growth (ALP). These papers use variants of the Baily, Hulten and Campbell (1992)...