The decline in the U.S. labor share is far from uniform across firms. While the aggregate labor share has declined, especially in manufacturing, retail, and wholesale, the labor share of a typical firm in these industries has risen. This paper studies the dynamics of the substitution of capital...

Retailer capacity decisions can impact sales for products by affecting, for example, availability and visibility. Using data from the U.S. video rental industry, we report estimates of the effect of capacity on sales. New monitoring technologies facilitated new supply contracts in this industry,...

I study how online competition, with its algorithmic pricing technologies and the transparency of the Internet, can change the pricing behavior of large retailers and affect aggregate inflation dynamics. In particular, I show that online competition has raised both the frequency of price changes...

Online prices are increasingly being used for a variety of inflation measurement and research applications, yet little is know about their relation to prices collected offline, where most retail transactions take place. This paper presents the results of the first large-scale comparison of...

We review major changes in the economics of the US retail sector over the past 15-20 years and discuss what these portend for the future evolution of retail. The sector has been shrinking in relative size over the long term, though this stopped around the onset of the Great Recession. Retail has...

We estimate the sensitivity of Internet retail purchasing to sales taxes using data from the eBay marketplace. Our first approach exploits the fact that seller locations are revealed only after buyers have expressed interest in an item by clicking on its listing. We use millions of location...

I study the positive relationship between prices of tradable goods and per-capita income. I develop a highly tractable general equilibrium model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and non-homothetic consumer preferences that positively links prices of tradables to consumer income....

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)...

This paper studies the dollarization of prices in retail markets of emerging economies. We develop a model of the firm's optimal currency choice in retail markets in inflationary economies. We derive theoretical predictions regarding the optimality of dollar pricing, and test them using data...

Using an administrative payroll dataset for 2.6 million retail workers, we find that the staggered rollout of a major e-commerce firm's fulfillment centers reduces traditional retail workers' income in geographically proximate counties by 2.4%. Wages of hourly workers, especially part-time...