One measure of the ex ante cost of disasters is the welfare gain from shortening their expected duration. We introduce a stochastic clock into a standard disaster model that summarizes information about progress (positive or negative) towards disaster resolution. We show that the stock market...

Net corporate profits have persisted at historical highs for almost 10 years. Such levels exceed what can be profitably re-invested, as evidenced by aggregate dividend payouts and buybacks nearing 6% of GDP. We argue that at such levels corporate profits operate effectively as a tax on the...

The digital revolution of pricing enables retailers to change their prices more frequently than ever before. While the industry endorses this development, critics fear it could foster excessive price fluctuations. This paper studies price fluctuations in the context of brick-and-mortar retailing...

This paper demonstrates that when an industry faces potential entry and this threat of entry constrains pre-entry prices, cost and conduct are not identified from the comparative statics of equilibrium. In such a setting, the identifying assumption behind the well-established technique of...

To aid in the description and estimation of the tremendous recent growth in the collaborative economy, we provide a model for the dynamics of sharing, subject to fixed costs and imperfect price formation. The sharing economy comprises a set of infinitely lived, heterogeneous suppliers, who take...

Competitors privately sharing price intentions is universally prohibited under antitrust/competition law. In contrast, there is no common well-accepted treatment of competitors privately sharing prices. This paper shows that firms sharing prices leads to higher prices. Based on this theory of...

Entry by multinational enterprises (MNEs) into emerging markets has increased substantially over the last decades. Many of these MNE entries have taken place in concentrated markets. To capture these features, we construct a strategic interaction model of MNE cross-border acquisition and...

There is a growing concern that U.S. merger control may have been too lenient, but empirical evidence remains limited. Event studies have been used as one method to acquire empirical insights into the competitive effects of mergers. However, existing work suffers from strong identifying...

This study shows that mergers’ price effects can vary seasonally. I document countercyclical price increases due to the Coors and Miller merger, which is consistent with models of coordinated pricing that predict lower equilibrium prices during high-demand states

This paper considers the effects of raising the cost of entry for a potential competitor on infinite-horizon Markov-perfect duopoly dynamics with ongoing demand uncertainty. All entrants serving the model industry incur sunk costs, and exit avoids future fixed costs. We focus on the unique...