This paper examines the effect of Wal-Mart's entry into Mexico on Mexican manufacturers of consumer goods. Guided by firm interviews that suggested substantial heterogeneity across firms in how they responded to Wal-Mart's entry, we develop a dynamic industry model in which firms decide whether...

We investigate the causal effect of market structure on market performance in the consumer electronics. We combine data from Austria's largest online site for price comparisons with retail data on wholesale prices provided by a major hardware producer for consumer electronics. We observe input...

This Paper analyses the impact of retail mergers on product variety. We show that a merging firm may want to enhance its buyer power vis a vis suppliers by delisting products and committing to a ‘single-sourcing’ purchasing strategy. Anticipating this, suppliers will strategically choose to...

We develop a model of competition between retailer chains with a structural estimation of the demand and supply in the supermarket industry in France. In the model, supermarkets compete in price and brand offer over all food products to attract consumers, in particular through the share of...

This Paper develops an argument explaining why retail prices may rise in response to the deregulation of opening hours. We make this point in a model of imperfect duopolistic competition. In a deregulated market retailers view the choice of opening hours as a means to increase the degree of...

This Paper investigates how the formation of larger buyers affects a supplier's profits and, by doing so, his incentives to undertake non-contractible activities. We first identify two channels of buyer power, which allows larger buyers to obtain discounts. We subsequently examine the effects of...

Foreign-owned firms are often hypothesized to generate productivity “spillovers” to the host country, but both theoretical micro-foundations and empirical evidence for this are limited. We develop a heterogeneous-firm model in which ex-ante identical workers learn from their employers in...

Gains from productivity and knowledge transmission arising from the presence of foreign firms have received a good deal of empirical attention, but theoretical micro-foundations for this mechanism are limited. Here we develop a dynamic model in which foreign experts may train domestic workers...