We use Monte Carlo experiments to evaluate whether "upward pricing pressure" (UPP) accurately predicts the price effects of mergers, motivated by the observation that UPP is a restricted form of the first order approximation derived in Jaffe and Weyl (2013). Results indicate that UPP is quite...

The theoretical literature of industrial organization shows that the distances between consumers and firms have first-order implications for competitive outcomes whenever transportation costs are large. To assess these effects empirically, we develop a structural model of competition among...

We examine how forward contracts affect economic outcomes under generalized market structures. In the model, forward contracts discipline the exercise of market power by making profit less sensitive to changes in output. This impact is greatest in markets with intermediate levels of...

We analyze the accuracy of first order approximation, a method developed theoretically in Jaffe and Weyl (2012) for predicting the price effects of mergers, and provide an empirical application. Approximation is an alternative to the model-based simulations commonly employed in industrial...

We demonstrate that cost pass-through can be used to inform demand calibration, potentially eliminating the need for data on margins, diversion, or both. We derive the relationship between cost pass-through and consumer demand using a general oligopoly model of Nash-Bertrand competition and...

This article empirically investigates the cause of asymmetric pricing: retail prices responding faster to cost increases than decreases. Using daily price data for over 11,000 retail gasoline stations, I nd that prices fall more slowly than they rise as a consequence of rms extracting...

We show that, in general, consistent estimates of cost pass-through are not obtained from reduced-form regressions of price on cost. We derive a formal approximation for the bias that arises even under standard orthogonality conditions. We provide guidance on the conditions under which bias may...

Information frictions play a key role in a wide array of economic environments and are frequently incorporated into formal models as search costs. Yet, as search costs are typically unobserved, little empirical work investigates the determinants of the distribution of consumer search costs and...