This paper investigates a real-business-cycle economy that features dispersed information about the underlying aggregate productivity shocks, taste shocks, and, potentially, shocks to monopoly power. We show how the dispersion of information can (i) contribute to significant inertia in the...

Empirical researchers often have to map data provided for a "reporting" spatial unit, say counties in 1900, to a "reference" one, say, counties in 2010. We discuss a general method to create such crosswalks: computing the share of the area of each reporting unit nested in a given reference unit....

We introduce a new survey module intended to complement and expand research on the causes and consequences of advanced technology adoption. The 2018 Annual Business Survey (ABS), conducted by the Census Bureau in partnership with the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics...

We investigate the relationships of bank failures and balance sheet conditions with measures of proximity to different forms of transportation in the United States over the period from 1830-1860. A series of hazard models and bank-level regressions indicate a systematic relationship between...

A growing body of empirical literature finds that consumers are relatively limited in how much they search over product characteristics. We assemble a dataset of search and purchase behavior from eBay to quantify the returns, and thus implied costs, to consumer search on the internet. The...

This paper examines the impact of e-commerce on pricing behavior and welfare. Using Japanese data, we find that the entry of e-commerce firms significantly raised the rate of intercity price convergence for goods sold intensively online, but not for other goods. E-commerce also lowered relative...

We examine the effect of consumer reviews on relative sales of books on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. We find that 1) reviews are overwhelmingly positive at both sites, but there are more reviews and longer reviews at Amazon.com, 2) an improvement in a book's reviews leads to an increase in...

Trust is vital for market development, but how can trust be enhanced in a marketplace? A common view is that more trusting may help to build trust, especially in less developed economies. In this paper, we argue that more trusting may lead to less trust. We set up a rational expectation model in...

The internet has dramatically reduced the cost of varying prices, displays and information provided to consumers, facilitating both active and passive experimentation. We document the prevalence of targeted pricing and auction design variation on eBay, and identify hundreds of thousands of...

Increased competition from the internet has raised concerns about the quality of prescription drugs sold online. Given the pressure from the Department of Justice, Google agreed to ban pharmacies not certified by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) from sponsored search...