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...

During the Great Moderation, macroeconomic volatility declined while firm markups increased. We document a causal relationship between volatility and markups due to tacit collusion. We exploit the legalisation of interstate banking as an exogenous decrease in volatility. Using an instrumental...

We examine day-trading activities for 540 stocks traded on the Korea Stock Exchange using transactions data for the period from 1999 to 2000. Our cross-sectional analysis reveals that day-traders prefer lower-priced, more liquid, and more volatile stocks. By estimating various bivariate VAR...

We study dynamic signaling in a game of stochastically evolving stakes. Our motivating example is dynamic limit pricing in markets with persistent demand shocks. An incumbent is privately informed about its costs, high or low, and can deter a potential entrant by setting prices strategically....

The current research assesses the risks commonly attributed to the presence of HFT in the context of different market structures deployed by the U.S. exchanges. In particular, we find that, by design, the so-called “normal” exchanges have the lowest market quality, including the highest...

In this paper, we study a new channel to explain firms' price setting behavior. We propose that uncertainty about factor prices has a positive effect on markups. We show theoretically that firms with higher shares of inputs with volatile prices set higher markups. We use the Bartik shift-share...

Output-based allocations (OBAs) are typically used in emission trading schemes to mitigate leakage in sectors at risk. Recent work has shown they may also help to stabilize prices in markets subject to supply and demand shocks. We extend previous work to simultaneously include both leakage and...

We bridge the organisational economics and industrial economics literatures on the vertical boundaries of the firm by contextualising the transaction cost approach to the make-or-buy decision within an oligopolistic market structure. Firms invest in the quality of the intermediate resulting in...

We model cartel defection in markets with stochastic demand fluctuations as an investment timing problem. We show that (i) the optimal timing of cartel defection is pro-cyclical, suggesting higher probability of competitive pricing during booms; and (ii) the defection trigger is a positive...