Price Controls and Market Structure: Evidence from Gasoline Retail Markets

In this paper we study the effect of price floor regulations on the organization and performance of markets. The standard interpretation of the effects of these policies is concerned with short‐run market distortions associated with excess supply. Since price controls prevent markets from clearing, they lead to higher prices. While this analysis may be correct in the short‐run, it does not consider the dynamic equilibrium consequences of price controls. We demonstrate that price floor regulations can have important long‐run effects on the the structure of markets by crowding them and creating endogenous barriers to entry for low‐cost retailers. Moreover, we show that these factors can indirectly lower productivity and possibly even prices. We test this in the context of an actual regulation imposed in the retail gasoline market in the Canadian province of Québec and show that the policy led to more competition between smaller/less efficient stations. This resulted in lowered sales, and, despite the reduction in efficiency, did not increase prices.     

Price Competition and Market Segmentation in Retail Gasoline: New Evidence from South Korea

I examine price dispersion in retail gasoline and focus on differentiation along the service dimension: full service versus self service. Consistent with more intensive search by self-service customers, I find that price dispersion always decreases with the number of nearby self-service stations, but does not decrease with the number of nearby full-service stations. When I segment the market by brand, I observe that the estimates are sensitive to how brands are separated into different types. These findings show that the market is more clearly segmented by service level than by brand type and also highlight the importance of product differentiation when modeling price dispersion.     

Construction Cycles in the United States Since World War II*

The article analyzes the cycles of total construction and its major sectors after adjustment for the varying growth trends of real expenditures. Fluctuations in GNP and business fixed investment serve as “reference cycles.” The findings elucidate the relationships between cycles in total construction and its components and between construction and GNP cycles. Special analyses are devoted to the movements of public versus private construction expenditures and to the “countercyclical” behavior of residential building. The paper shows increasing volatility of private construction over time and substantial inter-sector differences in average volatility. Although public policies have a strong potential influence on the cyclical performance of construction, the complexities revealed in the study indicate severe problems in attempts to stabilize its output.     

Missing Price Information and Its Impact on Equilibrium Price Dispersion: Evidence From Gasoline Signboards*

This article seeks to quantify the importance of price information in reducing consumer search costs and equilibrium price dispersion in a competitive setting. It exploits a natural experiment in the retail gasoline industry in which stations post the prices of only certain grades of gasoline on large street-side signboards, and not others, except where required by law. Differential-by-grade signboard information predicts a specific curvature in price dispersion across grades, and differentiates itself from other noninformational factors such as income and cost. The impact of readily-available price information on search and price dispersion is found to be exceptionally large.     

Down Payment Saving in the United States: Evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics

We present a model of household saving toward a mortgage loan under an exogenous down payment requirement and preference for owning over renting. Our model explains a set of empirical observations such as the dual effect in the form of some households, in response to higher down payments, becoming discouraged savers while those who do not abandon purchasing plans save more. We also employ instrumental variable‐based methods to investigate the down payment saving behavior of first‐time home buyers in the United States. The empirical results based on Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data support the inelastic down payment elasticity of saving implied by our model.     

A Reexamination of Public-Sector Wage Differentials in the United States: Evidence from the NLSY with Geocode

While many researchers have sought to estimate federal-private wage differentials in the United States, most of them ignore the issues of unobserved heterogeneity and selectivity among sectors. This article seeks to fill the gap in previous literature by using a more appropriate data set and several compelling techniques. The main results suggest substantial bias in ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates of federal-private wage differentials due to individual heterogeneity and self-selection. The direction of bias under selectivity correction (upward for men and downward for women) is consistent with results from both test-score approach estimates and the fixed-effects estimates.     

Momentum and House Price Growth in the United States: Anatomy of a Bubble

This article analyzes the bubble in property values across cities in the United States from 1999 through 2005. We find evidence of momentum in house price growth (relative to growth in rents) away from the underlying fundamentals throughout the 1980–2005 period; however, momentum increased after 1999. We find that the bubble happened mostly after 2003; it was for a relatively short period and was characterized by a series of positive, seemingly random, shocks that were associated with the surge in the subprime market and the decline in short‐term interest rates. Before that price changes were reasonably well explained by the fundamentals, particularly the decline in long‐term interest rates in the early part of the bubble period. We do not find evidence of a tendency for prices relative to rents to revert to a long‐run trend.     

Occupational Licensing and the Earnings Premium in the United States: Updated Evidence from the Current Population Survey

Using survey data from 2015 to 2018, this article analyses the occupational licensing wage premium in the United States. The estimates show a robust 4–6 per cent wage differential for licensed workers. This premium is robust to careful control for location/local labour market effects and occupation effects. The premium is also positive for the majority of individual occupations and groups of occupations estimated. Similar results are found using additional techniques, including a matching estimator and an analysis of border metropolitan statistical areas.     

Competition and Price Discrimination: Evidence from the Parking Garage Industry

We study the relationship between competition and price discrimination through an empirical examination of hourly price schedules in the parking garage industry. We find that the degree of price schedule curvature decreases with competition, implying a greater proportionate drop in low‐end prices than in high‐end prices when competition intensifies. Our findings suggest that competition constrains a firm's capacity to exercise price discrimination, confirming the classic textbook theory. We also offer possible explanations for our findings, including a search cost explanation, for which we find some support in the data.     

Price Dispersion Over the Business Cycle: Evidence from the Airline Industry

This study provides empirical evidence documenting how price dispersion moves with the business cycle in the airline industry. Performing a fixed‐effects panel analysis on seventeen years of data covering two business cycles, we find that price dispersion is highly pro‐cyclical. This effect is especially pronounced for legacy carriers relative to low‐cost carriers. We show that our empirical result is consistent with firms' implementing second‐degree price‐discrimination tactics.     

Price Dispersion and Price Discrimination: Empirical Evidence from a Spot Market for Water

This note shows the existence of price dispersion and pricediscrimination in a spot market for water.Several behaviors contributing to this dispersion/discrimination arefound for both the seller and buyer in this relatively competitive market,and examples are given of each. Using some previous theoretical work,the common thread linking the differing behaviors is shown to bediffering levels of information and search costs.     

Merger Policy in the United States: A Reconsideration

Review of Industrial Organization -     

Enterprise Unions in the United States

Through a case study of a large industrial company ( TRW ) , this paper examines the history and functioning of independent local unions ( ILUs ). TRW's ILU plant wages were about the same as those at affiliated union plants and higher than those at nonunion plants. The premium explains why TRW and other companies discarded ILUs in favor of a "new" nonunion model. Yet ILUs can remedy some of the defects in that model and thus belong on the policy and research agenda     

Privatizing Highways in the United States

We review the experience of both private toll-roads built in the United States during the 1990s, and argue that the problems they encountered could have been avoided if the length of the franchise contract would adapt to demand realizations. We also argue in favor of adjudicating private toll-roads via BOT-type contracts in competitive (Demsetz) auctions. The lessons of this paper are relevant since growing congestion and troubled government finances have made private toll-roads increasingly attractive in the United States.     

Prices and Price Dispersion on the Web: Evidence from the Online Book Industry

Using data collected between August, 1999, and January, 2000, covering 399 books, we examine pricing by thirty-two online United States-based bookstores. At the aggregate level, we find that both advertising and competitive structure had the predicted effects. More competition led to lower prices and to lower price dispersion. Holding competitive structure constant, more widely advertised items also had lower prices. At the firm level, we observe considerable heterogeneity in behavior. Firms had differentiated (or attempted to differentiate) on dimensions such as brand, price, and selection.     

The Effect of Explicit Communication on pricing: Evidence from the Collapse of a Gasoline Cartel

We study the collapse of collusion in Québec's retail gasoline market following a Competition Bureau investigation, and show that it involved two empirical regularities: high margins, and asymmetric price adjustments. Using weekly, station‐level prices we test whether collusion was successful, and whether asymmetric adjustments were part of the cartel's strategy. We do so in the markets targeted by the investigation, and in markets throughout the province with similar pre‐collapse pricing (cyclical markets). Our results suggest that stations in both target and cyclical markets adjusted pricing following the announcement: margins fell (by 30%/15% in target/cyclical markets), and adjustments became more symmetric.     

Price Formation Under Small Numbers Competition: Evidence from Land Auctions in Singapore

This article examines the price formation process under small numbers competition using data from Singapore land auctions. The theory predicts that bid prices are less than the zero-profit asset value in these first-price sealed-bid auctions. The model also shows that expected sales price increases with the number of bidders both because each bidder has an incentive to offer a higher price and because of a greater likelihood that a high-value bidder is present. The empirical estimates are consistent with auction theory and show that the standard land attributes are reflected in auction prices as expected.     

Municipal fiber in the United States: A financial assessment

Despite growing interest in broadband provided by municipally owned and operated fiber-to-the-home networks, the academic literature has yet to undertake a systematic assessment of these projects' financial performance. To fill this gap, we utilize municipalities' official reports to offer an empirical evaluation of the financial performance of every municipal fiber project in the U.S. operating in 2010 through 2019. An analysis of the actual performance of the resulting fifteen-project panel dataset reveals that none of the projects generated sufficient nominal cash flow in the short run to maintain solvency without infusions of additional cash from outside sources or debt relief. Similarly, 87% have not actually generated sufficient nominal cash flow to put them on track to achieve long-run solvency. In addition, 73% generated negative nominal cash flow over the past three fiscal years, leaving them poorly positioned to make up their deficits and causing them to fall farther into debt. An assessment based on the net present value of these projects' operating cash flow indicates that 53% of projects would not be on track to breakeven even assuming the theoretical best-case performance in terms of capital expenditures and debt service. Close analysis of these projects’ performance reveals that revenue generation likely plays a more important role in generating cash flow than efficiency in construction costs or operating efficiency.     

Youth Apprenticeship in Britain: Lessons for the United States

Britain's effort to introduce youth apprenticeships over the past decade offers important general lessons about the role of employers in school-to-work initiatives. In particular, the incentives facing employers work against efforts to provide skills training. Alternative arrangements for such programs are suggested that create incentives for employers to improve the skills of youth apprentices.     

Price elasticity of demand for broadband: Evidence from Latin America and the Caribbean

In this study the authors analyze fixed broadband retail prices in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and provide estimates about the effect of price changes on broadband adoption. The analysis is based on a survey of plans and tariffs conducted by the authors during Q2 2010. Their results suggest that fixed broadband services in LAC are generally expensive and of poor quality when benchmarked against Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, although there is significant variance between markets in the region. In order to isolate the effect of prices on broadband adoption they use an instrumental-variable approach. Their findings show that broadband demand is relatively elastic to price in LAC but not in the OECD. They estimate that an average price reduction of 10% would result in an increase of almost 22% in the penetration rate in LAC, equivalent to almost 8.5 million additional broadband connections. Several policy implications result from these findings. First, national broadband policies in LAC should pay a closer attention to a deficit of competition in fixed broadband services, as households and firms face high prices for poor quality services, thus deterring adoption. Second, while their findings generally suggest that price reductions could significantly increase penetration, they elasticity estimates reveal that price effects might not be sufficient to achieve the penetration goals set in national broadband plans. This validates the need for complementary policy strategies that affect other determinants of broadband demand. The example of Brazil is used to illustrate this finding.