Regulations aimed at curbing the entry of large retail stores have been introduced in many countries to protect independent retailers. Analyzing a planning reform launched in the United Kingdom in the 1990s, I show that independent retailers were actually harmed by the creation of entry barriers...

Do prices respond to macro shocks? Does the mere presence of international frontiers hinder trade? We revisit these questions by studying a dataset of online book prices for a number of US and Canadian retailers. We believe our dataset is well suited to this task for a number of reasons: (1)...

Consumers often benefit from increased competition in differentiated product settings. In this paper we consider consumer benefits from increased competition in a differentiated product setting: the spread of non-traditional retail outlets. In this paper we estimate consumer benefits from...

We analyze a number of unstudied aspects of retail electricity competition. We first explore the implications of load profiling of consumers whose traditional meters do not allow for measurement of their real time consumption, when consumers are homogeneous up to a scaling factor. In general,...

The standard economic model of efficient competitive markets relies on the ability of sellers to charge prices that vary as their costs change. Yet, there is no restructured electricity market in which most retail customers can be charged realtime prices (RTP), prices that can change as...

Consumers living near the U.S.-Canada border can shift their expenditures between the two countries, so real exchange rate fluctuations can act as demand shocks to border areas' retail trade industries. Using annual county-level data, we estimate the effects of real exchange rates on the number...

The potential benefits of demand side interventions may leak into the profits of suppliers whenever there is market power. In those situations, governments could attempt to regulate the market or to increase competition. We provide the first experimental evidence on the effect of increased...

This paper develops a dynamic model of retail competition and uses it to study the impact of the expansion of a new national competitor on the structure of urban markets. In order to accommodate substantial heterogeneity (both observed and unobserved) across agents and markets, the paper first...

Prior research shows grocery stores reduce prices to compete with Walmart Supercenters. This study finds evidence that the competitive effects of two other big box retailers - Costco and Walmart-owned Sam's Club - are quite different. Using city-level panel grocery price data matched with a...