Prior research shows grocery stores reduce prices to compete with Walmart Supercenters. This study finds evidence that the competitive effects of two other big box retailers - Costco and Walmart-owned Sam's Club - are quite different. Using city-level panel grocery price data matched with a...

This paper examines the effect of Wal-Mart's entry into Mexico on Mexican manufacturers of consumer goods. Guided by firm interviews that suggested substantial heterogeneity across firms in how they responded to Wal-Mart's entry, we develop a dynamic industry model in which firms decide whether...

In part due to the popular perception that Big-Boxes displace smaller, often family owned (a.k.a. Mom-and-Pop) retail establishments, several empirical studies have examined the evidence on how Big-Boxes' impact local retail employment but no clear consensus has emerged. To help shed light on...

We show that most US food, drugstore, and mass merchandise chains charge nearly-uniform prices across stores, despite wide variation in consumer demographics and competition. Demand estimates reveal substantial within-chain variation in price elasticities and suggest that the median chain...

This paper identifies a new channel through which bankrupt firms impose negative externalities on non-bankrupt peers. The bankruptcy and liquidation of a retail chain weakens the economies of agglomeration in any given local area, reducing the attractiveness of retail centers for remaining...

This article examines patterns of entry and exit in a relatively homogeneous product market to investigate the impact of entry on incumbent firms and market structure. In particular, we are interested in whether the organizational form of entrants matters for the competitive decisions of...

This paper develops and estimates a model of indivisibilities in shipping and economies of scale in consolidation. It uses highly detailed data on imports for which it is possible to observe the contents of individual containers. In the model, a firm is able to adapt to indivisibility...

One empirical phenomenon that has received little attention in the franchising literature is the tendency for individual franchisees to own not just one but several units of a given franchised chain. Most current theories of franchising, based on incentives, information asymmetries, and...

We measure the effects of chain economies, business stealing, and heterogeneous firms' comparative advantages in the discount retail industry. Traditional entry models are ill-suited for this high-dimensional problem of strategic interaction. Building upon recently developed profit inequality...

This paper estimates the impact on consumer behavior of a firm’s voluntary disclosure of information. Specifically, we study the impact of Starbucks’ disclosure of calorie information on its menu boards in June 2013. Using data on over 250,000 consumers’ visits to specific restaurant...