We show that most US food, drugstore, and mass merchandise chains charge nearly-uniform prices across stores, despite wide variation in consumer demographics and the level of competition. Estimating a model of consumer demand reveals substantial within-chain variation in price elasticities and...

I study whether and how retail chains and their geographic distribution of stores contribute to the propagation of shocks across regions in the United States. Linking detailed store scanner micro-data to a county-level house price dataset for the period of the Great Recession, I investigate the...