Might firms' use of data create market power? To explore this hypothesis, we craft a model in which economies of scale in data induce a data-rich firm to invest in producing at a lower marginal cost and larger scale. However, the model uncovers much richer interactions between data, welfare and...

Food manufacturing and processing is an important link between agricultural producers and consumers in the agricultural supply chain. The food manufacturing sector in the United States is both increasingly mechanized and increasingly concentrated. Consequently, labor risks in food manufacturing...

Using data from a longitudinal survey of fast food restaurants in Texas, the authors examine the impact of recent changes in the federal minimum wage on a low-wage labor market The authors draw four main conclusions. First, the survey results indicate that less than 5 percent of fast food...

The question of how firms build market share matters for firm dynamics, business cycles, international trade, and industrial organization. Using Nielsen Retail Scanner data for the United States, we document that in the consumer food industry, brands experience substantial growth in market share...

This paper develops and estimates a search and bargaining model designed to measure the welfare loss associated with frictions in oligopoly markets with negotiated prices. We use the model to quantify the consumer surplus loss induced by the presence of search frictions in the Canadian mortgage...

The United States spends twice as much per person on pharmaceuticals as European countries, in large part because prices are much higher in the US. This fact has led policymakers to consider legislation for price controls. This paper assesses the effects of a US international reference pricing...

This paper estimates returns to scale for manufacturing industries around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States by exploiting an industry-city panel data for the years 1880-1930. We estimate decreasing returns to scale on average over the period, contrary to most of the existing...

Entrepôts are hubs that facilitate trade between multiple origins and destinations. We study these entrepôts, the network they form, and their impact on international trade. We document that the trade network is a hub-and-spoke system, where 80% of trade is shipped indirectly--nearly all via...

Increasing returns are as fundamental a cause of international trade as comparative advantage, but their role has until recently been neglected because of the problem of modelling market structure. Recently substantial theoretical progress has been made using three different approaches. These...

In this paper we estimate variants of a labor demand equation derived from a (restricted variable) cost function in which "experience"on a technology (proxied by the mean age of the capital stock) enters "non-neutrally." Our specification of the underlying cost function isbased on the hypothesis...