Ranking have become increasingly popular on markets for study programs, restaurants, wines, cars, etc. This paper analyses the welfare implication of such rankings. Consumers have to make a choice between two goods of unknown quality with exogenous presence or absence of an informative ranking....

A number of empirical studies document that marginal cost shocks are not fully passed through to prices at the firm level and that prices are substantially less volatile than costs. We show that in the relative-deep-habits model of Ravn, Schmitt-Grohé, and Uribe (2006), firm-specific marginal...

The existing tax policies towards gasoline and diesel cars in the European countries provide a unique opportunity to analyze intertemporal investment aspects in consumer behavior and quality-based price discrimination aspects in manufacturer pricing behavior. We develop an econometric framework...

We document the presence of multiple and varied constraints to small and medium firm growth. This presents both a practical problem for business training programs and a challenge to academic economists trying to identify mechanisms though which these programs may affect outcomes. External...

We investigate the marketing practice of framing a price as a discount from an earlier price. We discuss two reasons why a discounted price---rather than a merely low price---can make a consumer more willing to purchase. First, a high initial price can indicate the product is high quality....

Lancasterian models of product differentiation typically assume a one-dimensional characteristics space. We show that standard results on prices and locations no longer hold when firms compete in a multi-characteristics space. In the location game with n characteristics, firms choose to maximize...

We use a novel disaggregate sectoral euro area data set with a regional breakdown to investigate price changes and suggest a new method to extract factors from over-lapping data blocks. This allows us to separately estimate aggregate, sectoral, country-specific and regional components of price...

We construct a unique dataset of legislative reforms in merger control legislation that occurred in nineteen industrial countries in the period 1987-2004, and test the economic impact of these changes on firms’ stock prices. In line with the standard monopolistic hypothesis, we find that the...

This paper compares how cash and in-kind transfers affect local prices. Both types of transfers increase the demand for normal goods, but only in-kind transfers also increase supply. Hence, in-kind transfers should lead to lower prices than cash transfers, which helps consumers at the expense of...

After some decades of relative oblivion, the interest in the optimality properties of monopolistic competition has recently re-emerged due to the availability of an appropriate and parsimonious framework to deal with firm heterogeneity. Within this framework we show that non-separable utility,...