It is well known that new businesses are typically much smaller than their established industry competitors, and that this size gap closes slowly. We show that even in commodity‐like product markets, these patterns do not reflect productivity gaps, but rather show differences in demand‐side...

The conventional wisdom in health economics is that idiosyncratic features of the healthcare sector leave little scope for market forces to allocate consumers to higher performance producers. However, we find robust evidence across a variety of conditions and performance measures that higher...

This paper empirically investigates the possible market power effects of vertical integration proposed in the theoretical literature on vertical foreclosure. It uses a rich data set of cement and ready-mixed concrete plants that spans several decades to perform a detailed case study. There is...

Many studies have documented large and persistent productivity differences across producers, even within narrowly defined industries. This paper both extends and departs from the past literature, which focused on technological explanations for these differences, by proposing that demand-side...

We present several empirical facts about trends in marketing investment in the US. We also present estimates of the private value of brands to firms and aggregate intangible brand capital stocks created by these investments. These investments include the creation and maintenance of a brand name...

This paper describes a new publicly available dataset on shutdown orders and related policies at the county and city level across the United States during the early part of the COVID-19 crisis, from March through May of 2020. In hundreds of counties around the country, local governments issued...

The collapse of economic activity in 2020 from COVID-19 has been immense. An important question is how much of that collapse resulted from government-imposed restrictions on activity versus people voluntarily choosing to stay home to avoid infection. This paper examines the drivers of the...

While a fast-growing body of research has looked at how the advent and diffusion of e-commerce has affected prices, much less work has investigated e-commerce's impact on the number and type of firms operating in an industry. This paper theoretically and empirically takes up the question of...

This paper examines how incumbents respond to the threat of entry of competitors, as distinguished from their response to competitors' actual entry. It uses a case study from the passenger airline industry specifically, the evolution of Southwest Airlines' route network - to identify particular...