Search frictions can explain why the "law of one price" fails in retail markets and why even firms selling commodity products have pricing power. In online commerce, physical search costs are low, yet price dispersion is common. We use browsing data from eBay to estimate a model of consumer...

Search frictions can explain why the "law of one price" fails in retail markets and why even firms selling commodity products have pricing power. In online commerce, physical search costs are low, yet price dispersion is common. We use browsing data from eBay to estimate a model of consumer...

This paper studies how private equity buyouts create value in higher education, a sector with opaque product quality and intense government subsidy. With novel data on 88 private equity deals involving 994 schools, we show that buyouts lead to higher tuition and per-student debt. Exploiting loan...

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic led to a large number of studies in household finance, using new high-frequency data in close to real time. This paper surveys household behavior during the pandemic, with a focus on consumption, government policies, credit and investment. The pandemic induced a rapid...

This paper studies how private equity buyouts create value in higher education, a sector with opaque product quality and intense government subsidy. With novel data on 88 private equity deals involving 994 schools, we show that buyouts lead to higher tuition and per-student debt. Exploiting loan...

We use the 2013 federal government shutdown and a rich data set from an online personal finance website to study the effects of changes in income on changes in consumption. The 2013 shutdown represented a significant and unanticipated income shock for federal government workers, with no direct...