We study the welfare effects of a merger between ad-funded platforms facing elastic consumer demand. We show that advertising fees as well as quality investment levels by the platforms fall post-merger. Interestingly, despite the lower advertising fees, advertisers may be worse off when their...

Widespread market imperfections in agricultural value chains raise the possibility that regulatory interventions may enhance efficiency and farmers' welfare. We develop a structural model of agricultural value chains and estimate it using rich data from Costa Rica's coffee sector to evaluate...

This article examines U.S. Treasury securities market functioning from the global financial crisis (GFC) through the Covid-19 pandemic given the ensuing market developments and associated policy responses. We describe the factors that have affected intermediaries, including regulatory changes,...

Online platforms have evolved into powerful programmable architectures that enable heterogeneous groups of autonomous but interdependent users to interact. Based on a stratified sample of 1,380 companies from a newly developed enterprise survey in Austria, the analysis aims to reduce the lack of...

This paper studies the relationship between market concentration and aggregate productivity when firmlevel demand emerges from past marketing investments. Granular firms may invest in demand both to complement their productivity and to amplify market power-this second force can create persistent...

El hambre y la desnutrición siguen siendo desafíos de desarrollo críticos en América Central. Desde 2020, han aumentado las tasas de inseguridad alimentaria moderada y grave en toda la región, mientras que los indicadores clave relativos a la nutrición en la primera infancia siguen siendo...

This paper examines the impact of safeguard import tariffs on market diversity in Ecuador from 2015 to 2017. Using firm-level data, we estimate the effects of tariffs on revenue and market shares in the Manufacturing and Wholesale & Retail (W&R) sectors with a Quantile Treatment Effect on the...

This paper shows that in an economy where distortions prevent firms from using their profit-maximizing amounts of capital and labor, removing these distortions can generate both an efficiency gain and a higher aggregate labor share. We use firm-level data on Chinese manufacturing, mining, and...

Given the changing landscape of fuel retailing, this study explores the impact of spatial competition and market concentration on diesel prices in Germany. The question of how population density and gas station density, i.e. the equilibrium pattern of locations of firms, are related is examined....

This study aims to investigate the impact of the market structure and efficiency on firm performance in the meat and milk processing industry in Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia. Using stochastic frontier analysis and a profitability regression model applied to data from 2015 to 2021, the results...

State governments provide grants to students to subsidize college attendance. In response, colleges can adjust their tuition, aid policies, and admission standards, affecting equilibrium enrollment and pass-through of aid to students. To quantify demand- and supply-side responses, I develop a...

We study the standard reputation model with a long-run (LR) player facing a sequence of short-run (SR) opponents, with one difference: the SR players are uncertain about the monitoring structure, while the LR player knows it. We construct examples where the standard reputation result breaks...

This article examines the price effects of gasoline stations following a retail merger in 2022. Using detailed station-level price data from 2020 to 2024, the analysis shows that fuel prices increase at both merging stations and their competitors, but with regional differences. These regional...

This paper studies how firms’ ownership choices and workers’ intrinsic motivation jointly shape service quality and market outcomes in labor-intensive, mission-driven sectors. Two organizations first choose whether to operate as standard for-profit or as mission-oriented firms, and then...

Increasing competition and reducing market power are core interests of economists, regulators and the public to maximise aggregate social welfare. Low prices are achieved through intense competition in the retail gasoline market. The absence of fierce competition is referred to as market power....

Non-bank financial institutions, such as principal-trading firms and hedge funds, increasingly compete with bank-owned dealers in fixed-income markets. Some market participants worry that if non-bank financial institutions push out established bank dealers, liquidity will become unreliable...

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...

I study the passthrough of regulated ad valorem pharmacy markups and reduced Value Added Tax (VAT) rates to pharmaceutical retail prices in Finland. My reduced form evidence shows that pharmaceutical manufacturers respond to a decrease in regulated pharmacy markups by increasing their wholesale...

The functioning of the banking sector is key for economic growth. In this paper, we first gather banks' balance sheet monthly regulatory information in a consistent manner for seven Latin American countries. Second, we estimate lending markups and deposits markdowns in each country over time....

Heterogeneous interconnections, which link regulated electricity markets to liberalised ones, are becoming increasingly important. Several such interconnections are set to be established in the near future especially between European and North African countries (e.g., Tunisia-Italy,...

We develop a macroeconomic agent-based model to study the role of demand and supply factors in determining inflation dynamics. Local interactions of heterogeneous firms and households in the labor and goods markets characterize the model. Asymmetric information implies that firm selection is...

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) relies on a complex supply chain comprising five key layers: hardware, cloud infrastructure, training data, foundation models and AI applications. This paper examines the market structure of each layer and highlights the economic forces...

This paper examines the welfare implications of priority service in a frictional search environment with heterogeneous outside options. Priority search facilitates expedited matching with public options in the market by charging a service premium. Our main analysis demonstrates that a...