So-called "horizontal mergers" of firms whose products are direct substitutes at the point of sale have garnered significant attention from researchers and regulators alike. We consider the effect of mergers between firms whose products are not viewed as direct substitutes for the same good or...

Following the Global Pharma Health Fund e.V. Minilab® protocol, we find 9.88% of samples have less than 80% of the correct active ingredient and 41.5% of these failures are counterfeits. Both product registration and chain affiliation of retailers are strong indicators of higher probability to...

We explore the role of strategic price-discrimination by retailers for price determination and inflation dynamics. We model two types of customers, "loyals" who buy only one brand and do not strategically time purchases, and "shoppers" who seek out low-priced products both across brands and...

What is the relationship between product prices and vertical integration? While the literature has focused on how integration affects prices, this paper provides evidence that prices can affect integration. Many theories in organizational economics and industrial organization posit that...

Despite the importance of patient insurance in the market for prescription pharmaceuticals, little is known about the impact of insurance on the pricing behavior of pharmaceutical firms. This paper examines the link between insurance and pricing using a unique policy experiment from Germany....

I examine price markups in monopolisticly-competitive markets that experience fluctuations in demand because the economy experiences cyclical fluctuations in productivity. Markups depend positively on the average income of purchasers in the market. For a nondurable good average income of...

This paper investigates pricing by Japanese manufacturing firms in export and domestic markets. The paper reports equations explaining the margin between export prices in yen and domestic prices for a wide range of final goods including many of the electronic and transport products which have...

Under conditions of natural monopoly, private contracts or government regulation may attempt to avoid inefficiency by setting up a pricing formula. Once the capital stock is chosen,the right price to charge the buyer is marginal cost. But the point of this paper is that marginal-cost pricing...

It is the price behavior in primary manufacturing industries and its implication for general inflation that is the subject of this paper. The industries comprising primary manufacturing are quite diverse. They differ with respect to labor and capital intensity, domestic and international market...

From its inception, demand estimation has faced the problem of "many prices." This paper provides estimators of average demand and associated bounds on exact consumer surplus when there are many prices in cross-section or panel data. For cross-section data we provide a debiased machine learner...