Why do consumers value shopping online? We decompose the value of e-commerce to individual consumers and highlight the role of convenience, i.e., the avoidance of transportation costs. We complement household purchase panel data with precise locations of consumers and stores, and show that...

Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns ("sales") by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out. We challenge this view. First, using the 1996 -...

In this paper, we analyze the strategic role of the recent introduction of national brand products by hard discounters in the French market and its impact both at the retail and manufacturer levels. We use a structural econometric model of vertical relationships that takes into account the...

This paper examines the relation between prices in conventional stores and on the Internet. Main results from the theoretical analysis are i) we expect a discrete fall in prices in conventional stores as the share of the population with access to Internet reaches a critical level, ii) the...

This paper investigates the link between product quality and price setting for central processing units (CPUs). Using thousands of price quotes from a popular price-comparison website, we find that market fundamentals, such as the number of sellers, median price, share of convenient prices and...

Technological innovations facilitating e-commerce have well-documented effects on consumer behavior and firm organization in the retail sector, but the effects of these new transaction technologies on fiscal systems remain unknown. By extending models of commodity tax competition to include...

This paper empirically measures the impact of information quality on the success of firms' investment decisions, using the fixed schedule of the U.S. Census as an exogenous source of variation in information quality. I use establishment level data on firm entry and exit to measure changes in...

This paper studies the factors underlying the heterogeneity in inventory behavior and performance across retail stores. We use a dynamic model of multi-product retailers and local competition to estimate store productivity and consumers' perceived quality of the shopping experience, and we...

Delegation in hiring (DIH) is becoming a mainstream management practice among business chains worldwide, yet theoretical and empirical evidence of its effects remains scarce. DIH refers to the use of store managers to do their own recruiting, rather than relying on the headquarters human...

The comparison of company performances, i.e., benchmarking, is becoming more and more critical. Presently, companies mostly use traditional financial ratios to evaluate their financial performance. We also use financial ratios to measure and compare company performances, from which we create...