-
"Road Infrastructure and Retail Markets", JMP
[Abstract]
Abstract: This paper explores the impacts of transportation infrastructure on U.S. retail markets. The identification strategy relies on variation in historical transportation infrastructure. Using detailed scanner data, I examine the effects of U.S. interstate highways on various aspects of consumer welfare. First, the findings indicate that interstate highways reduce prices and expenditures on retail goods and improve the quality of goods purchased by consumers. Second, interstate highways not only increase the supply of unique products in stores but also the variety of products purchased by consumers. Finally, the analysis reveals that interstate highways reduce the retail price index for both low and high-income consumers. Accounting for the costs of construction and maintenance, counterfactual analyses show that interstate highways enhance consumer welfare.
-
"Regional Price Indexes and Stimulus Payments Allocation", revise and resubmit,
Regional Science and Urban Economics
[Abstract]
Abstract: In this paper, I develop regional and income group-specific price indexes by estimating demand functions derived from a model of consumer choice with non-homothetic preferences using detailed barcode-level and household survey data. To illustrate the importance of differences in the cost of living across US households on the real impacts of the federal tax and transfer system, this paper examines a counterfactual policy that adjusts the 2020 stimulus payments based on regional and household group-specific price indices. The results reveal significant variation in the real impact of stimulus payments. For example, to have the same real impact, the nominal value of a stimulus payment to a household in California would need to be about two and a half times the amount as a payment to a household with the same income but living in Arkansas.
-
"Uniform Brand Variant Pricing and Cost Pass-Through to Retail Prices" (under review), with Danna Thomas
[Abstract]
Abstract: We show that price uniformity is prevalent within stores and across products of the same brand, termed uniform brand variant pricing. We then study how this impacts input cost pass-through by developing a simple theoretical framework that we use to inform empirical pass-through models. We find that (1) cost pass-through for all inputs is identical across all brand variants, (2) cost pass-through for inputs contained in all brand variants is higher than cost pass-through for inputs used in only a subset of brand variants, and (3) input cost pass-through increases as the share of brand variants containing that input increases.
-
"Tax Multipliers in a DSGE Model", with Jason DeBacker and Richard W. Evans
[Abstract]
Abstract forthcoming.