This chapter discusses recent developments in the literature involving applications of industrial organization methods to finance. We structure our discussion around a simple model of a financial intermediary that concentrates its attention either on (i) the retail market and hence engages in a...

This paper examines the impact of bank regulations, market structure, and national institutions on bank net interest margins and overhead costs using data on over 1,400 banks across 72 countries while controlling for bank-specific characteristics. The data indicate that tighter regulations on...

This paper studies a mechanism design model of financial intermediation. There are two informational frictions: agents receive unobservable shocks and can participate in markets by engaging in trades unobservable to intermediaries. Without regulations, intermediaries provide no risk sharing...

I characterize the optimal financial regulation policy in an economy where financial intermediaries trade capital assets on behalf of households, but must retain an equity stake to align incentives. Financial regulation is necessary because intermediaries cannot be excluded from privately...

Regulatory debates about centralized trading assume security design is immune to market structure. We consider a regulator who introduces an exchange to increase liquidity, understanding that security design is endogenous. For a given security, investors would like to trade in a larger market...

Over the past decade, an increasing number of firms have delegated pricing decisions to algorithms in consumer markets such as travel, entertainment, and retail; business markets such as digital advertising; and platform markets such as ride-sharing. This trend, driven primarily by the increased...

Quality regulation attempts to ensure quality and foster competition by reducing vertical differentiation, but it may also have adverse effects on market structure. We study this trade-off in the context of pharmaceutical bioequivalence, which is the primary quality standard for generic drugs....

Digital advertising, which uses consumer data to target ads to users, now accounts for most of global ad expenditures. Privacy concerns have prompted regulations that restrict the use of personal data. To inform these policy debates, we develop an equilibrium model of advertising and market...

We present models of asset management by the elderly. We focus on saving, spend-down of assets, and gift-giving, and the influence of health on these precesses. We also study the evolution of elderly health and the impact of economic variables on health outcomes. We present results from...

We propose a model of asset management in which benchmarking arises endogenously, and analyze its unintended welfare consequences. Fund managers' portfolios are unobservable and they incur private costs in running them. Conditioning managers' compensation on a benchmark portfolio's performance...