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...

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...

As more and more activities in the economy become digitized, analytics and data-driven decision-making (DDD) are becoming increasingly important. The adoption of analytics and DDD has been slower in small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) compared to large firms, and reliable causal estimates of the...

We analyze the economic consequences of rising health care prices in the US. Using exposure to price increases caused by horizontal hospital mergers as an instrument, we show that rising prices raise the cost of labor by increasing employer-sponsored health insurance premiums. A 1% increase in...

We develop a simple model to explain why a powerful importer country like the United States may provide political support for international collusive agreements concerning certain commodities (e.g., coffee). This behavior raises questions due to the fact that an importer country should have...

We propose an equilibrium theory of data-driven antitrust oversight in which regulators launch investigations on the basis of suspicious bidding patterns and cartels can adapt to the statistical screens used by regulators. We emphasize the use of asymptotically safe tests, i.e. tests that are...

We hand-collect and standardize information describing all 3,055 antitrust lawsuits brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) between 1971 and 2018. Using restricted establishment-level microdata from the U.S. Census, we compare the economic outcomes of a non-tradable industry in states...

Between 2000 and 2020, the share of US hospital bed capacity under multi-unit firms (systems) increased from 58% to 81% - a rapid corporatization of a sector with $1.3 trillion in annual spend. However, little is known about how system ownership affects hospital profitability and quality. We...

Understanding the behavior of users online is important for researchers, policymakers, and private companies alike. But observing online behavior and conducting experiments is difficult without direct access to the user base and software of technology companies. We introduce Webmunk, an...

The COVID-19 pandemic initiated a trend in "work-from-home (WFH)," but workers need reliable and fast internet connections (e.g., broadband) to work from home. Yet, as of January 2020, 18 states had legally restricted local governments and cooperatives from building their own broadband...