Digital platforms are not only match-making intermediaries but also establish internal rules that govern all users in their ecosystems. To better understand the governing role of platforms, we study two Airbnb pro-guest rules that pertain to guest and host cancellations, using data on Airbnb and...

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...

Using an administrative payroll dataset for 2.6 million retail workers, we find that the staggered rollout of a major e-commerce firm's fulfillment centers reduces traditional retail workers' income in geographically proximate counties by 2.4%. Wages of hourly workers, especially part-time...

I study how online competition, with its algorithmic pricing technologies and the transparency of the Internet, can change the pricing behavior of large retailers and affect aggregate inflation dynamics. In particular, I show that online competition has raised both the frequency of price changes...

I study the positive relationship between prices of tradable goods and per-capita income. I develop a highly tractable general equilibrium model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and non-homothetic consumer preferences that positively links prices of tradables to consumer income....

Do prices respond to macro shocks? Does the mere presence of international frontiers hinder trade? We revisit these questions by studying a dataset of online book prices for a number of US and Canadian retailers. We believe our dataset is well suited to this task for a number of reasons: (1)...

While a fast-growing body of research has looked at how the advent and diffusion of e-commerce has affected prices, much less work has investigated e-commerce's impact on the number and type of producers operating in an industry. This paper theoretically and empirically takes up the question of...

Online prices are increasingly being used for a variety of inflation measurement and research applications, yet little is know about their relation to prices collected offline, where most retail transactions take place. This paper presents the results of the first large-scale comparison of...

We present an equilibrium search model that parsimoniously rationalizes the use of auctions as a sales mechanism for new-in-box goods--a frequent occurrence in online retail markets--and analyze whether the existence of these auctions is welfare enhancing relative to a market consisting only of...

We review major changes in the economics of the US retail sector over the past 15-20 years and discuss what these portend for the future evolution of retail. The sector has been shrinking in relative size over the long term, though this stopped around the onset of the Great Recession. Retail has...