Curbing obesity through taxation of certain beverage products has been a priority in the policy agenda across many U.S. jurisdictions. We assess the effectiveness of this highly debated policy instrument through two measures of its impact: the pass-through rate (the extent to which the tax...

Competition studies that focus on antitrust issues (e.g. market definition, market power) are typically conducted in markets where all firms are assumed to operate legally (competitors are tax-abiding entities, pay for all inputs used in their production process, have paid the proper government...

We barcode-level information on the near-universe of packaged foods around the time when certain U.S. food manufacturers committed to the 2009 National Sodium Reduction Initiative, a voluntary pledge to reduce sodium content in food products by 2014. We pursue two objectives. First, we isolate...

A feature of electronic communication markets is that a consumer's decision to join or use a communications network can generate two effects on other users of the network: a network externality and a call externality. The former effect is defined as the benefit that users receive when a new...

The off-net/on-net price differential in mobile voice observed in many countries is much larger than what can be explained away by standard economic theory. This situation has generated important anticompetitive concerns, leading some authorities to contemplate (and even impose) a ban on such...

We evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the volume and quality of firms’ daily usage of remote (video) meeting technologies. While per-firm daily meeting volume (minutes, number of meetings, and total participants) increase significantly(between 15% and 48%), the average meeting is...

Diet quality can be improved via two factors: healthier product offerings by food manufacturers and healthier purchasing habits of consumers. In this paper, we take a closer look at sodium, a food constituent identified as an important determinant of several acute health problems. In 2009, food...

This paper studies infinitely repeated games with stochastic demand in an experimental environment. The lab experiments are constructed to test the effects of demand information (knowledge of next period’s demand realization) and monitoring (knowledge of rivals’ actions) on collusion. Two...

We conduct Monte Carlo experiments to investigate the biases in structural estimation of demand for differentiated products when the assumed demand functional form is misspecified. We focus on aggregate data (i.e. not individual purchase decisions) and generate stochastic equilibrium price and...

This study utilizes a brand-level dataset that captures a unique natural experiment, a 100% increase in the excise tax, to evaluate different pricing models in the U.S. beer industry. To assess the plausibility of different models, the increase in marginal cost resulting from the tax increase is...