The New Trade Theory predicts that international trade lowers prices for consumers and expands the choices available to them. This study shows that both predictions may no longer hold once adjustments in the retail sector are taken into account. I present a new model of retailing in general...

We study competition among a score of firms participating in an online market for a commodity computer component. Firms were able to adjust prices continuously; prices determined how the firms were ranked and listed (lowest price listed first), with better ranks contributing to firms’ sales....

Slotting allowances are fees paid by manufacturers to get access to retailers’ shelf space. Both in the USA and Europe, the use of slotting allowances has attracted attention in the general press as well as among policy makers and economists. One school of thought claims that slotting...

We study final product manufacturers’ incentives to introduce new products into the market and how they are affected by a merger among them. We show that when manufacturers distribute their products through multi-product retailers, a manufacturers merger, although it leads to an increase in...

Two types of agents interact on a pre-existing free platform. Agents value positively the presence of agents of the other type but may value negatively the presence of agents of their own type. We ask whether a new platform can find fees and subsidies so as to divert agents from the existing...

This paper studies comprehensive national panel data of local option sales taxes at the monthly frequency. I calculate state-by-month population weighted averages of local sales tax rates. I document ten stylized facts concerning the time series patterns and spatial dynamics of local sales...

The paper investigates survival patterns of Brazilian franchising firms during the 1994-1999 period. First, at a more descriptive level one considered the (percentage) survival of newly created franchisors in the following years. The evidence indicated a drastic decay in survival after only a...

We consider a monopolistic supplier’s optimal choice of wholesale tariffs when downstream firms are privately informed about their retail costs. Under discriminatory pricing, downstream firms that differ in their ex ante distribution of retail costs are offered different tariffs. Under uniform...

We introduce unemployment and endogenous selection of workers into different skill-classes in a trade model with two sectors and heterogeneous firms. This allows us to study the distributional consequences and the skill-specific unemployment effects of trade liberalization. We show that the...

Convex vacancy creation costs shape firms’ responses to trade liberalization. They induce capacity constraints by increasing firms’ cost of production, leading a profit maximizing firm not to fully meet the increased foreign demand. Hence, firms will only serve a few export markets. More...