We analyze third degree price discrimination by an upstream monopolist to a continuum of heterogeneous downstream firms. The novelty of our approach is to recognize that customizing prices may be costly. As a consequence, partial price discrimination arises in equilibrium; in particular,we...

We study the impact of a recent digital automation technology - industrial robotics - on the distribution of sales, productivity, markups, and profits within industries. Our empirical analysis combines data on the industry-level stock of industrial robots with firms' balance sheet data for six...

In recent years, a growing interest among authorities has emerged to verify which paradigm better explains the profit-structure relationship in the Mexican banking industry: market power or efficiency. To test these two paradigms, this work constructs specific indicators of cost efficiency based...

The literature on costs of price adjustment has long argued that changing prices is a complex and costly process. In fact, some authors have suggested that we should think of firms’ price-setting activities as “producing” prices, similar to the way firms use production processes to produce...

We show that U.S. banks price deposits almost uniformly across their branches and that this pricing practice is crucial to explain the deposit rate dynamics following bank mergers. We find a strong and sharp post-merger convergence between the deposit rates of the acquired branches and the...

This paper studies regulatory policy interventions aimed at protecting sticky consumers who are exposed to exploitation. We model heterogeneous consumer switching costs alongside asymmetric market shares. This setting encompasses many markets in which established firms are challenged by new...

Industry concentration and markups in the US have been rising over the last 3- 4 decades. However, the causes remain largely unknown. This paper uses machine learning on regulatory documents to construct a novel dataset on compliance costs to examine the effect of regulations on market power....

Our study of Belgian firms found that 2022 price increases were largely attributable to rising intermediate input costs. Wage increases also contributed to prices hikes. Interestingly, markups appeared to play no role in driving up prices and in fact decreased or even offset the contribution of...

E-commerce has become more prevalent throughout Europe in the last decade. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic accelerated this trend, particularly in the retail sector. This paper focuses on the implications of increasing business-to-consumer ecommerce for prices and inflation in the euro area....

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY *** Concerns about the market power of large corporations are growing. There are good reasons why monopoly now features so prominently on the political and economic agenda. Mounting evidence shows that corporate concentration stifles innovation and investment, resulting in...