We present a model to explain why a manufacturer may impose a minimum resale price (min RPM) in a successive monopoly setting. Our argument relies on the retailer having non-contractible choice variables, which could represent the price of a substitute good and/or the effort the retailer exerts...

One of the greatest challenges facing official statistics in the 21st century is the use of alternative sources of data about prices (scanned and scraped data) in the analysis of price dynamics, which also involves selecting the appropriate formula of the price index at the elementary group...

This paper examines the extent to which gains-from-trade predictions from commonly-used trade theories are consistent with observed household consumption decisions. Our approach is based on inference from household-level estimation of food Engel curves in the US and in a few other countries. For...

This paper studies the relative performance of alternative monetary policy rules in the presence of oil price shocks in a small open economy optimizing model. Our analysis shows that it is important to distinguish between alternative price indices (CPI, core CPI, and GDP deflator) when modeling...

This paper investigates the existence of market power and the sequentiality of games in the crude oil market. In particular, we examine whether Saudi Arabia acts as a Stackelberg leader or in a simultaneous-move framework, in a number of market power scenarios ranging from perfect competition to...

We study a class of symmetric, quasi-homothetic preferences that result in demands logarithmic in own prices when these have a negligible impact on aggregate price indices (as in monopolistic competition models). Thus marginal revenues are computationally friendly, and decreasing whenever...

This paper analyzes the transmission from global commodity to domestic food prices for a large set of countries. First, a theoretical model is developed to explain price transmission for different trade regimes. Drawing from the competitive storage model under rational expectations, it is shown...