While inferring markups from demand data is common practice, estimation relies on difficult-to-test assumptions, including a specific model of how firms compete. Alternatively, markups can be inferred from production data, again relying on a set of difficult-to-test assumptions, but a wholly...

We describe changes over time in inequality in postsecondary education using nearly seventy years of data from the U.S. Census and the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. We find growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and...

Theory suggests that bank integration (financial integration generally) can magnify or dampen the business cycles, depending on the importance of shocks to firm collateral versus shocks to the banking sector. In this paper, we show empirically that bank integration across U.S. states over the...

We examine the impact of loss of U.S. patent exclusivity (LOE) on the prices and utilization of specialty drugs between 2001 and 2007. We limit our empirical cohort to drugs commonly used to treat cancer and base our analyses on nationally representative data from IMS Health. We begin by...

The view that the strength of the dollar in the early 1980s was associated with persistent restructuring of United States industry is supported by correlations between exchange rate patterns and data on business formation, business failure and sectoral investment in new plant and equipment....

An upstream manufacturer can use minimum retail price maintenance (RPM) to exclude potential competitors. RPM lets the incumbent manufacturer transfer profits to retailers. If entry is accommodated, upstream competition leads to fierce down- stream competition and the breakdown of RPM. Hence,...

We extend the basic Schumpeterian endogenous growth model by allowing incumbents to undertake innovations to improve their products, while entrants engage in more "radical" innovations to replace incumbents. Our model provides a tractable framework for the analysis of growth driven by both entry...

Firm size follows Zipf's Law, a very fat-tailed distribution that implies a few large firms account for a disproportionate share of overall economic activity. This distribution of firm size is crucial for evaluating the welfare impact of economic policies such as barriers to entry or trade...

We study the long-run evolution of brand preferences, using new data on consumers' life histories and purchases of consumer packaged goods. Variation in where consumers have lived in the past allows us to isolate the causal effect of past experiences on current purchases, holding constant...