Addictive Platforms
We study competition for consumer attention, in which platforms can sacrifice service quality for attention. A platform can choose the “addictiveness” of its service.
Market structure
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Vertical Bargaining and Obfuscation
Is obscuring prices always bad for consumers? The answer depends on the market structure and on the negotiating power between manufacturers and retailers. -
Systemic Risk and Portfolio Diversification: Evidence from the Futures Market
This paper explores how the Canadian futures market contributed to banks’ systemic risk during the 2008 financial crisis. It finds that core banks as a whole traded against the periphery, in this way increasing their risk of simultaneous losses. -
Rising US LNG Exports and Global Natural Gas Price Convergence
We assess how rising exports of US liquefied natural gas affect the convergence of natural gas prices worldwide. Our results may have implications for the development of future LNG export capacity in Canada. -
Centralizing Over-the-Counter Markets?
Would a shift in trading in fixed-income markets—from over the counter (bilateral trading) to a centralized electronic platform—improve welfare? We use trade-level data on the secondary market for Government of Canada debt to answer this question. -
The Effects of Government Licensing on E-commerce: Evidence from Alibaba
How does government licensing affect selling on online platforms? We examine the impact of China’s 2015 Food Safety Law on sellers and buyers on Alibaba, the largest e-commerce platform in that country. -
Bank Runs, Bank Competition and Opacity
How is the stability of the financial sector affected by competition in the deposit market and by decisions banks make about transparency? We find that policies that aim to increase bank competition lead to higher bank deposit rates, increasing both withdrawal incentives and instability. -
Examining the Impact of Home Purchase Restrictions on China’s Housing Market
How do “cooling measures” in the housing market—policies aimed to stabilize prices—affect the market? We use a structural model of housing demand and price competition among developers to evaluate China’s home purchase restriction policies implemented in 2010–11. -
Trade and Market Power in Product and Labor Markets
Trade liberalizations increase the sales and input purchases of productive firms relative to their less productive domestic competitors. This reallocation affects firms’ market power in their product and input markets. I quantify how the labour market power of employers affects the distribution and size of the gains from trade. -
Market Concentration and Uniform Pricing: Evidence from Bank Mergers
We show that US banks price deposits almost uniformly across their branches and that this pricing practice is more important than increases in local market concentration in explaining the deposit rate dynamics following bank mergers.