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19 Results

Flagship Entry in Online Marketplaces

Staff Working Paper 2023-41 Ginger Zhe Jin, Zhentong Lu, Xiaolu Zhou, Lu Fang
In this paper, we empirically study how flagship entry in an online marketplace affects consumers, the platform, and various sellers on the platform. We find flagship entry may benefit consumers by expanding the choice set, by intensifying price competition within the entry brand, and by improving consumer perception for parts of the platform.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Salespeople: Evidence from a Cold-Drink Market

Staff Working Paper 2021-40 Haofeng Jin, Zhentong Lu
Salespeople are widely employed in many industries. We leverage a unique data set on retail sales from a leading Chinese cold-drink manufacturer and information on the firm’s salespeople assignment rule to measure the causal effect of salespeople on product revenue.
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Labour markets, Service sector JEL Code(s): L, L8, L81, M, M3, M5

The Effects of Government Licensing on E-commerce: Evidence from Alibaba

Staff Working Paper 2021-32 Ginger Zhe Jin, Zhentong Lu, Xiaolu Zhou, Chunxiao Li
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.

Overlooking the online world: Does mismeasurement of the digital economy explain the productivity slowdown?

Staff Analytical Note 2021-10 Alejandra Bellatin, Stephanie Houle
Since the mid-2000s, labour productivity has slowed down in Canada despite enormous technological advances that were expected to improve it. This note investigates whether mismeasurement of the digital economy can explain this paradox.
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff analytical notes Topic(s): Productivity JEL Code(s): E, E0, E01, L, L8, L86, O, O3, O33, O4, O5, O51

Distributional Effects of Payment Card Pricing and Merchant Cost Pass-through in Canada and the United States

Although credit cards are more expensive for merchants to accept than cash or debit cards, merchants typically pass through their costs evenly to all customers. Along with consumer card rewards and banking fees, this creates cross-subsidies between payment methods. Because higher-income individuals tend to use credit cards more than those with lower incomes, our results indicate that these cross-subsidies might lead to regressive distributional effects.

Technology Adoption in Input-Output Networks

Staff Working Paper 2019-51 Xintong Han, Lei Xu
We study how input-output networks affect the speed of technology adoption. In particular, we model the decision to adopt the programming language Python 3 by software packages. Python 3 provides advanced features but is not backward compatible with Python 2, which implies it comes with adoption costs.
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Firm dynamics, Productivity JEL Code(s): C, C6, C61, L, L2, L23, L8, L86, O, O1, O14, O3, O33

Amazon Effects in Canadian Online Retail Firm-Product-Level Data

Staff Working Paper 2019-42 Alex Chernoff
I use firm-product-level data for Canadian online retailers to study how product scope (the average number of product categories per firm) evolved from 1999 to 2012. During this period, product scope dropped monotonically from 59 to 5 product categories.
Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Firm dynamics, Service sector JEL Code(s): D, D2, D22, L, L1, L11, L8, L81

Exchange Rates, Retailers, and Importing: Theory and Firm-Level Evidence

Staff Working Paper 2019-34 Alex Chernoff, Patrick Alexander
We develop a model with firm heterogeneity in importing and cross-border shopping among consumers. Exchange-rate appreciations lower the cost of imported goods, but also lead to more cross-border shopping; hence, the net impact on aggregate retail prices and sales is ambiguous.

Explaining the Interplay Between Merchant Acceptance and Consumer Adoption in Two-Sided Markets for Payment Methods

Staff Working Paper 2019-32 Kim Huynh, Gradon Nicholls, Oleksandr Shcherbakov
Recent consumer and merchant surveys show a decrease in the use of cash at the point of sale. Increasingly, consumers and merchants have access to a growing array of payment innovations as substitutes for cash.

Inference in Games Without Nash Equilibrium: An Application to Restaurants’ Competition in Opening Hours

Staff Working Paper 2018-60 Erhao Xie
This paper relaxes the Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE) assumption commonly imposed in empirical discrete choice games with incomplete information. Instead of assuming that players have unbiased/correct expectations, my model treats a player’s belief about the behavior of other players as an unrestricted unknown function. I study the joint identification of belief and payoff functions.
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