Research
Publications
The Review of Economics and Statistics 103, no. 4 (October 2021): 754–69.
This paper jointly considers the impact of the minimum wage on both labor and product markets using detailed store-level scanner data. I provide empirical evidence that a 10% increase in the minimum wage raises grocery store prices by 0.6%-0.8%, and suggest that the minimum wage not only raises labor costs but also affects product demand, especially in poorer regions. This points to novel channels of heterogeneity in pass-through that have distributional consequences, with key implications for real wage inequality, residential segregation, and future minimum wage increases. I also find that price rigidity within retail chains ameliorates these effects, reducing the pass-through elasticity for retail prices by about 60%.
Journal of Public Economics 217 (January 2023): 104760.
We study the effect of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on retail prices nationwide. State-level program adjustments motivate our identification strategy. A 1% increase in benefits per population raises grocery prices by a persistent 0.08%. A calibrated partial-equilibrium model implies a marginal benefit dollar raises a recipient’s consumer surplus from groceries by $0.7, producer surplus by $0.5, and lowers each non-SNAP consumer’s surplus by $0.05, because of a large marginal-propensity-to-consume-food out of SNAP, low elasticities of demand, and moderate market power. To guarantee the real intended spending power on food, benefits should be increased by 7%.
Working Papers
This paper documents an increase in household concentration in the US retail sector from 2004-2019. Despite a growing number of stores, households visit fewer stores, do more one-stop shopping, and increasingly shop at different retailers from each other. We find that the increasing availability of superstar retailers, rises in product variety within stores, and increases in households’ opportunity cost of time contribute to these trends. We explore how these trends are linked with rising retail markups. Our calibration suggests a 5 percentage point increase in aggregate retail markups during this period.
Big-box stores, such as supercenters and warehouse clubs, have grown rapidly in the US in recent decades. These retail establishments are physically large to enable one-stop shopping, offering a broad range of product categories with relatively low prices. In this paper, we study how the entry of big-box stores affect household consumption and welfare. We first present an event study of the store entries of four major big-box retail chains to provide empirical evidence that households switch a substantial proportion of their purchases to big-box stores after they enter. Resulting changes in varieties of products purchased per shopping trip and prices paid by households are strongly consistent with store characteristics. We then develop a novel multi-store multi-category choice model to quantify and disentangle the effects of product variety, prices, and other store characteristics on consumer welfare. We show that households benefit substantially from consuming in big-box stores, highlighting the importance of the store format.
Using multiple uniquely rich high-frequency datasets from a major two-sided online platform, we investigate the price setting behavior of sellers in online platform markets covering a wide range of products. We find levels of price stickiness similar to existing literature in online markets in various countries, but a larger differential between posted prices and regular prices that filter out temporary sales. We examine various empirical moments of price setting of interest to the literature, including the frequency and size of price changes, synchronization rate of products within sellers, predictors of price stickiness, and pricing policies of sellers. Many sellers engage in countercyclical pricing and price discrimination in response to high-frequency intraweek variation in demand from platform-level members-only consumer subsidies. However, sellers show muted price responses to low-frequency surges in demand from fiscal stimuli and pandemic lockdowns. We find suggestive evidence that sellers are more likely to distribute promotional coupons, mostly in the form of volume discounts, in response to fiscal stimuli. These empirical results provide valuable insights on the responsiveness of the economy to monetary and fiscal policies in a New Keynesian framework.