We investigate the effects of private equity on product markets using price and sales data for an extensive number of consumer products. Following a buyout, target firms increase sales 50% more than matched control firms. Price increases--roughly 1% on existing products--do not drive this...

Popular wisdom holds that publishers revise college textbooks mainly to kill off the secondary market for used books. While this behavior might be profitable if consumers are myopic, uninformed or have high short-run discount rates (that exceed the publishers'), neoclassical authors have noted...

Temporary price reductions (sales) are common for many goods and naturally result in large increase in the quantity sold. We explore whether the data support the hypothesis that these increases are, at least partly, due to dynamic consumer behavior: at low prices consumers stockpile for future...

This paper develops and tests a new set of stochastic implications of optimal consumption behavior in the presence of borrowing constraints. In a departure from previous models, the theory shows that liquidity constraints imply a distinctive intertemporal relationship between durable and...

Rankings have become increasingly popular on various markets, e.g. the market for study programs. We analyze their welfare implications. Consumers have to choose between two goods of unknown quality with exogenous presence or absence of an unbiased informative ranking. The existence of the...