We characterize the evolution of markups for consumer products in the United States from 2006 to 2019. Using detailed data on prices and quantities for products in more than 100 distinct product categories, we estimate flexible demand systems and recover markups under an assumption that firms...

We study how within-store price variation changes with inflation, and whether households exploit it to attenuate the inflation burden. We use micro price data for food products sold by 91 large multi-channel retailers in ten countries between 2018 and 2024. Measuring unit prices within narrowly...

Concentration is a single summary statistic driven by two opposing forces: the number of firms in a market and the evenness of their market shares. This paper introduces a generalized measure of concentration that allows researchers to vary the relative importance of each force. Using the...

The financialization view is that increased trading in commodity futures markets is associated with increases in the growth rate and volatility of commodity spot prices. This view gained credence because in the 2000s trading volume increased sharply and many commodity prices rose and became more...

We document how supply-chain pressures, household inflation expectations, and firm pricing power interacted to induce the pandemic-era surge in consumer price inflation in the euro area. Initially, supply-chain pressures increased inflation through a cost-push channel and raised inflation...

This paper tests for price patterns in retail gasoline markets consistent with those predicted by models of implicit collusion among firms. Recent supergame models show that the highest supportable collusive price is a function of today's profit relative to expected future profit: collusive...

While the labor market implications of mergers have been historically ignored as "out of market" effects, recent actions by the Department of Justice (DOJ) place buyer market power (i.e., monopsony) at the forefront of antitrust policy. We develop a theory of multi-plant ownership and monopsony...

We study changes in markups across 72 product markets from 2006 to 2018. A growing literature has documented a rise in markups over time using a production function approach; we instead employ the standard microeconomic method, which is to estimate demand and then invert firms' first-order...

Standard methods for estimating production functions in the Olley and Pakes (1996) tradition require assumptions on input choices. We introduce a new method that exploits (increasingly available) data on a firm's expectations of its future output and inputs that allows us to obtain consistent...

The US and other advanced countries suffered bursts of severe inflation in 2021 and the first half of 2022, followed by declines of inflation later in 2022, in some countries. In times of high volatility of price determinants--cost and productivity--inflation can jump upward and fall downward at...