Although recent international broadband penetration rankings have Congress concerned about U.S. broadband policy, these statistics should not play a large role in forming U.S. broadband policy, as they fail to take into account geographic factors, demographic factors and consumer preferences...

Investors owned 15 percent of all single family houses in the U.S. in the year 2000, with a value of fixed assets that dwarfed that of any single manufacturing industry, and approached that of the entire manufacturing sector. Owner occupied and investor owned houses are functionally identical...

The welfare cost of imperfect competition in the product and labor market as well as distortionary taxation is quantified in a dynamic general equilibrium model parameterized to fit the U.S. economy. We find that the welfare cost of imperfect competition in the product market is 35.74 percent...

Using granular data from the consumer goods industry, we study pricing and non-pricing effects of common ownership at the product level. We find positive elasticity of consumer goods prices to common ownership and that firms pass along price increases to consumers through the marginal cost...

The U.S. credit card market is highly concentrated and highly profitable, two facts which have drawn scrutiny of its competitive practices. I study competition in this market by analyzing how lenders target and acquire new customers using direct-mail, their principal acquisition channel. I find...

Digital advertising, which uses consumer data to target ads to users, now accounts for most of global ad expenditures. Privacy concerns have prompted regulations that restrict the use of personal data. To inform these policy debates, we develop an equilibrium model of advertising and market...

We characterize the evolution of markups for consumer products in the United States from 2006 to 2019. Using detailed data on prices and quantities for products in more than 100 distinct product categories, we estimate flexible demand systems and recover markups under an assumption that firms...

This article addresses developments in the literature on The Rise of Market Power. First, it summarizes research about the result of De Loecker 2020 that the sales-weighted average markup has increased in the United States. Second, it summarizes and evaluates a set of industry studies that...

Over the past four decades, the U.S. economy has seen a decline in the share of young firms alongside a rise in the profit share of GDP. This paper explores how population aging contributes to these twin trends through a demand-side channel. The core hypothesis is that younger households exhibit...

The role and importance of special interest groups in the policy process in the United States is well documented. Activities of such groups include putting political pressure on the government through lobbying and political campaign contributions to repeal certain regulations that cut into firm...