We investigate retailers' price setting behavior using a unique dataset containing by-the-second records of prices offered by closely competing retailers on a major Japanese price comparison website. First, we find that, when the average price of a product across retailers falls rapidly, the...

Is the cross-sectional distribution of house prices close to a (log)normal distribution, as is often assumed in empirical studies on house price indexes? How does it evolve over time? How does it look like during the period of housing bubbles? To address these questions, we investigate the...