This study presents an empirical test of the relationship between market concentration and new product introductions. The analysis uses an annual panel data set of the US processed food industry that spans across the period 1983 to 2004. The estimations depict that market concentration increases...

We build a model of firm entry and exit and show how returns to scale shape firm survival, the equilibrium productivity and size distributions and firm concentration. High productivity dispersion and high concentration ratios need not reflect inefficiencies when returns to scale are strongly...

We show that most US food, drugstore, and mass merchandise chains charge nearly-uniform prices across stores, despite wide variation in consumer demographics and the level of competition. Estimating a model of consumer demand reveals substantial within-chain variation in price elasticities and...

We analyze how the product market competition shock due to China’s WTO entry affects local US banks heterogeneously. Using a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we document that in regions with greater exposure to the shock, loan quality deteriorates and bank profitability declines...

Organizational and contract economics have achieved an increasingly important role in analyses of the food, agribusiness, and agricultural sectors. In particular, formal theoretical models of contract design and firm integration have begun to appear in the leading agricultural economics...

We investigate how the contractibility of actions affecting the value of an asset affects asset ownership. We examine this by testing how on-board computer (OBC) adoption affects truck ownership. We develop and test the proposition that adoption should lead to less ownership by drivers,...

This article examines the nature of the effect of the U.S. Supreme Court's Empagran decision through the lens of the global vitamins cartel, using legal and economic analysis and also empirical data to describe the effect. The article commences with a discussion of the analytic approach adopted...

I assess the effect of recent U.S. airline mergers on productive efficiency and market power. I recover productivity, markup, and marginal cost estimates for each airline using production and cost data. I then employ these estimates, a panel event study design, and synthetic control methods to...

I document the evolution of market power in the U.S. airline industry for the period 1990:Q1-2019:Q4. I recover estimates of markups, defined as the ratio of price to marginal cost, at the airline-time level. Dominant carriers in the industry have substantially increased their markups in the...

We study changes in markups across 72 product markets from 2006 to 2018. A growing literature has documented a rise in markups over time using a production function approach; we instead employ the standard microeconomic method, which is to estimate demand and then invert firms' first-order...