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...

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...

Interest in market power has recently surged among economists in many fields, well beyond its traditional home in industrial organization. This has focused empirical attention on markups, the ratios of price to marginal cost in product markets, and markdowns, the ratios of inputs' marginal...

We study the effect of price caps on the provision of costly effort by pharmaceutical firms using variation in drug discounts generated by a price regulation program that allows eligible hospitals to purchase outpatient drugs at steep discounts. These discounts directly affect drug...

We examine merging firms' additions and removals of products for a sample of 66 mergers across a wide variety of consumer packaged goods markets. We find that mergers lead to a net reduction in the number of products offered by merging firms. Merging firms tend to both drop and add products at...

From Elihu Thomson and Herbert Dow in the late nineteenth century to Steve Jobs a hundred years later, many entrepreneurs have been stymied by their investors. In this paper, we use a simple model to explore how outcomes might have been different if entrepreneurs, instead of the investors, had...

This chapter examines the multifaceted interactions between top digital platforms and technology ventures across capital, labor, innovation, and product markets. Exploring how venture investments, talent flows, strategic alliances, and competitive behaviors can shape the innovation ecosystem,...

This paper studies the effect of nonlinear pricing on markups and misallocation. We develop a general equilibrium model of firms that are allowed to set a quantity-dependent pricing schedule--contrary to the typical assumption in macroeconomic models. Without the restriction to linear pricing,...

Adverse selection is a classic market failure known to limit or "unravel"' trade in high-quality insurance and many other economic settings. While the standard theory emphasizes quality distortions, we argue that selection has another big-picture implication: it unravels competition among...

We present several empirical facts about trends in marketing investment in the US. We also present estimates of the private value of brands to firms and aggregate intangible brand capital stocks created by these investments. These investments include the creation and maintenance of a brand name...