The advent of mad cow disease in Canada and in the United States raises numerous concerns regarding consumer reaction to information in the United States. To examine the role of consumer reaction to information we examine the response of price spreads in the U.S. beef market to a Food Safety...

We develop a discrete-choice model of differentiated products for U.S. corn and soybean seed demand to study the welfare impact of genetically engineered (GE) crop varieties. Using a unique dataset spanning the period 1996-2011, we find that the welfare impact of the GE innovation is...

The three main measures of competition (HHI, Lerner Index, and H-Statistic) are uncorrelated for U.S. banks. We investigate why this occurs, propose a frontier measure of competition, and apply it to five major bank service lines using data only available since 2008. Fee-based banking services...

This paper considers the problem of identification, estimation and inference in the case of spatial panel data models with heterogeneous spatial lag coefficients, with and without (weakly) exogenous regressors, and subject to heteroskedastic errors. A quasi maximum likelihood (QML) estimation...

Should exporters worry about country-of-origin bias? Although the pervasiveness of country-level product advertising suggests that they do, lack of data has limited the empirical study of subjective bias toward products from a specific country. Using data from the U.S. wine industry, including...

Stock exchange operators compete for order flow by setting "make" fees for limit orders and "take" fees for market orders. When traders quote continuous prices, they can choose prices that perfectly neutralize any fee division, and traders stream to the exchange with the lowest total fee. The...

By April 2013, the FCC's recent bill-shock agreement with cellular carriers requires consumers be notified when exceeding usage allowances. Will the agreement help or hurt consumers? To answer this question, we estimate a model of consumer plan choice, usage, and learning using a panel of...

This paper studies consumer discrimination while taking into consideration the role of competition between firms, providing one of the first large-scale comprehensive analyses of consumer discrimination and market forces. We formally model consumer discrimination, where some majority-group...

Specialty hospitals tend to negotiate higher commercial insurance payments, even for relatively routine procedures with comparable clinical quality across hospital types. How specialty hospitals can maintain such a price premium remains an open question. In this paper, we examine a potential...

Publishers produce books in hardcover and paperback versions with different prices and time of market introduction. Analysis of detailed book-level data reveals that (i) price-cost differentials cannot be explained by cost differences, making this an example of quality discrimination; (ii)...