Does entry regulation hinder job creation? We investigate this question in the context of the French retail industry, a sector that has experienced especially low rates of job creation over the last 25 years. Since the early 70s, the French government has required regional zoning board approval...

This paper provides experimental evidence on the effect of increased competition on prices and quality in the retail sector. We randomized the entry of 61 firms into 72 markets serving the beneficiaries of a conditional cash transfer program in the Dominican Republic. Six months after the...

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...

Sears Roebuck and Co. faced similar challenges in the 1920s and the 1980s. On the strength of the early period's strategic investment decisions, the company grew into the nation's largest retailer and a pervasive factor in the economy. In the later period, unanswered challenges nearly destroyed...

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...

Substantial excitement currently exists in industry regarding the potential of using analytic tools to measure sentiment in social media messages to help predict individual reactions to a new product, including movies. However, the majority of models subsequently used for forecasting exercises...

We provide a general framework for investigating partial identification of structural dynamic discrete choice models and their counterfactuals, along with uniformly valid inference procedures. In doing so, we derive sharp bounds for the model parameters, counterfactual behavior, and...

We study the entry and exit of firms across U.S. industries over the past 40 years. The elasticity of entry with respect to Tobin’s Q was positive and significant until the late 1990s but declined to zero afterwards. Standard macroeconomic models suggest two potential explanations: rising...

Using staggered entry of two dockless bikesharing firms, we find the entrant expands the market for the incumbent. The entry helps the incumbent to serve a greater number of trips, make more bike investment, achieve higher revenue per trip, improve bike utilization rate, and form a wider and...

Markets with asymmetric information will often employ third-party certification labels to distinguish between higher and lower quality transactions, yet little is known about the effects of certification policies on the evolution of markets. How does the stringency in quality certification...