In this essay, we describe antitrust analysis of horizontal mergers in U.S. retail markets. We begin by providing a brief overview of the economic and legal framework governing horizontal merger policy, and highlight key issues in analyzing retail mergers. Next, we discuss the changing legal...

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

This paper attempts to broaden our understanding of retail pricing dynamics by providing some systematic evidence about U.S. grocery prices. Using a large data set containing prices on twenty categories of goods from thirty U.S. metro areas for the period 1988–1997, we find a number of...

We study a longitudinal sample of over one million French workers and over 500,000 employing firms. Real total annual compensation per worker is decomposed into components related to observable characteristics, worker heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity and residual variation. Except for the...