This paper studies asymmetric price responses of individual firms, via daily retail prices of almost all gasoline stations in the Netherlands and suggested prices of the five largest oil companies over more than two years. I find that 38% of the stations respond asymmetrically to changes in the...

This paper studies asymmetric price responses of individual firms, via daily retail prices of almost all gasoline stations in the Netherlands and suggested prices of the five largest oil companies over more than two years. I find that 38% of the stations respond asymmetrically to changes in the...

This paper provides a framework for direct analysis of the underlying price adjustment costs in an industry. A dynamic programming problem is specified for monopolistically competitive firms that face idiosyncratic costs of price adjustment. A numerical solution is calculated using value...

We study the determination of market power at the firm and industry levels when heterogeneous firms compete for sales to ex ante homogeneous buyers in a market with both directed and random search and free entry of firms that differ in productivity. Search and the distribution of productivity...

In this paper, we study a new channel to explain firms' price setting behavior. We propose that uncertainty about factor prices has a positive effect on markups. We show theoretically that firms with higher shares of inputs with volatile prices set higher markups. We use the Bartik shift-share...

Based on individual price records collected for the computation of the Austrian CPI, average frequencies of price changes and durations of price spells are estimated to characterize price setting in Austria. Depending on the estimation method, prices are unchanged for 10 to 14 months on average....

Theory suggests that uncertainty can play an important role in determining firms' decisions to shut down operations. In this paper, I provide evidence that input-price uncertainty leads to significant and persistent reductions in plant exits in the context of Brazilian manufacturing. I analyze...

The Panzar-Rosse model is a widely applied method to assess competitive conduct. In particular, it has been extensively used to analyze the competitive climate in the banking industry. To correct for differences in firm size, many empirical papers estimate a Panzar-Rosse revenue function with...

This paper combines new, author-collected tax data with data both from the American Chamber of Commerce Researchers Association (ACCRA) cost of living index (COLI) and from the Tax Burden on Tobacco (TBT) to measure the relative effects of city, county and state excise cigarette taxation on...

Output and input market distortions manifest as wedges in the firm's first order conditions. The production approach to markup estimation recovers the markup wedge using the output elasticity for a variable and undistorted input. We show that using the revenue elasticity for any variable input,...