Retailers are increasingly selling goods and services via subscriptions instead of spot markets. In this paper, we study one benefit to the retailer of selling subscriptions: the possibility that - presumably because of inattention or inertia - consumers continue to pay for subscriptions after...

Data on sales of memory modules are used to explore several aspects of e-retail demand. There is a strong relationship between e-retail sales to a given state and sales tax rates that apply to purchases from online retailers. This suggests that there is substantial substitution between online...

Most items are sold to consumers by retail stores. Stores have two features that distinguish them from auctions. First, the price is posted and a consumer who values the good at more than the posted price is sold the good. Second, the sale takes place as soon as the consumer decides to buy. In...

This paper studies how market competition influences the algorithmic design choices of firms in the context of targeting. Firms face the general trade-off between bias and variance when choosing the design of a supervised learning algorithm in terms of model complexity or the number of...

Consumers living near the U.S.-Canada border can shift their expenditures between the two countries, so real exchange rate fluctuations can act as demand shocks to border areas' retail trade industries. Using annual county-level data, we estimate the effects of real exchange rates on the number...

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...

**Revised version 2005** <p>This paper empirically examines the New Deal's impact on local economic activity, as measured by retail sales, during the 1930s. Using a recently-uncovered data set that describes over 30 federal New Deal spending, loan, and mortgage insurance programs across all U.S....</p>

We argue in this paper that retailers can strategically position store brands in product space to strengthen their bargaining position when negotiating supply terms with manufacturers of national brands. Using a bargaining framework we model a retailer's decision whether to carry an additional...

I examine the impact of the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards on weekly hours worked between 1938 and 1950 by comparing workers in wholesale trade, a sector which was covered by the Act, with those in retail trade, a sector which was not. I find that the Act reduced hours worked,...

Race has long been recognized as playing a critical role in policing. In spite of this awareness, there has been virtually no previous research attempting to quantitatively analyze the issue. In this paper, we examine the relationship between the racial composition of a city's police force and...