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How strong are strategic complementarities in price setting across firms? In this article, we provide a direct empirical estimate of firms’ price responses to changes in competitor prices. We develop a general theoretical framework and an empirical identification strategy, taking advantage of a new micro-level dataset for the Belgian manufacturing sector. We find strong evidence of strategic complementarities, with a typical firm adjusting its price with an elasticity of 0.4 in response to its competitors’ price changes and with an elasticity of 0.6 in response to its own cost shocks. Furthermore, we find evidence of substantial heterogeneity in these elasticities across firms. Small firms exhibit no strategic complementarities in price setting and complete cost pass-through. In contrast, large firms exhibit strong strategic complementarities, responding to both competitor price changes and their own cost shocks with roughly equal elasticities of around 0.5. We show that this pattern of heterogeneity in markup variability across firms is important for explaining the aggregate markup response to international shocks and the observed low exchange rate pass-through into domestic prices.

The platform design, the process that helps potential buyers on the internet navigate toward products they may purchase, plays a critical role in reducing search frictions and determining market outcomes. We study a key trade-off associated with two important roles of efficient platform design: guiding consumers to their most desired product while also strengthening seller incentives to lower prices. We use simple theory to illustrate this, and then combine detailed browsing data from eBay and an equilibrium model of consumer search and price competition to quantitatively assess this trade-off in the particular context of a change in eBay’s marketplace design.

We document basic facts about prices in online markets in the United States and Canada, which is a rapidly growing segment of the retail sector. Relative to prices in regular stores, prices in online markets are more flexible and exhibit stronger pass-through (60-75 percent) and faster convergence (half-life less than two months) in response to movements of the nominal exchange rate. Multiple margins of adjustment are active in the process of responding to nominal exchange rate shocks. Properties of goods, sellers, and markets are systematically related to pass-through and the speed of price adjustment for international price differentials.

In a model with heterogeneous-risk-aversion agents facing margin constraints, we show how securities' required returns increase in both their betas and their margin requirements. Negative shocks to fundamentals make margin constraints bind, lowering risk-free rates and raising Sharpe ratios of risky securities, especially for high-margin securities. Such a funding-liquidity crisis gives rise to \"bases,\" that is, price gaps between securities with identical cash-flows but different margins. In the time series, bases depend on the shadow cost of capital, which can be captured through the interest-rate spread between collateralized and uncollateralized loans and, in the cross-section, they depend on relative margins. We test the model empirically using the credit default swap—bond bases and other deviations from the Law of One Price, and use it to evaluate central banks' lending facilities.

We examine dealers' liquidity provision against mispricing in the corporate bond market from 2005 to 2009. Dealers on average serve as stabilizing liquidity providers by trading against widening price gaps between corporate bonds and credit default swaps (the CDS-bond basis). However, dealers cut back on liquidity provision as they suffer losses, mispricing becomes wider, or the funding situation worsens, consistent with the limited capital capacity of financial intermediaries. We also show that the unwinding of basis arbitrage trading can amplify mispricing by documenting that bond returns following the Lehman collapse were very low for bonds with strong preexisting basis arbitrage activity and for bonds underwritten by Lehman Brothers. Liquidity demand due to the exit of arbitrageurs can be a major driver of disruption in credit markets.

This article uses detailed barcode data on purchase transactions by households in 49 U.S. cities to calculate the first theoretically founded urban price index. In doing so, we overcome a large number of problems that have plagued spatial price index measurement. We identify two important sources of bias. Heterogeneity bias arises from comparing different goods in different locations, and variety bias arises from not correcting for the fact that some goods are unavailable in some locations. Eliminating heterogeneity bias causes 97% of the variance in the price level of food products across cities to disappear relative to a conventional index. Eliminating both biases reverses the common finding that prices tend to be higher in larger cities. Instead, we find that price level for food products falls with city size.

We use a novel data set of online prices of identical goods sold by four large global retailers in dozens of countries to study good-level real exchange rates and their aggregated behavior. First, in contrast to the prior literature, we demonstrate that the law of one price holds very well within currency unions for tens of thousands of goods sold by each of the retailers, implying good-level real exchange rates often equal to 1. Prices of these same goods exhibit large deviations from the law of one price outside of currency unions, even when the nominal exchange rate is pegged. This clarifies that the common currency per se, and not simply the lack of nominal volatility, is important in reducing cross-country price dispersion. Second, we derive a new decomposition that shows that good-level real exchange rates in our data predominantly reflect differences in prices at the time products are first introduced, as opposed to the component emerging from heterogeneous passthrough or from nominal rigidities during the life of the good. Further, these international relative prices measured at the time of introduction move together with the nominal exchange rate. This stands in sharp contrast to pricing behavior in models where all price rigidity for any given good is due simply to costly price adjustment for that good.

We examine dealers’ liquidity provision against mispricing in the corporate bond market from 2005 to 2009. Dealers on average serve as stabilizing liquidity providers by trading against widening price gaps between corporate bonds and credit default swaps (the CDS–bond basis). However, dealers cut back on liquidity provision as they suffer losses, mispricing becomes wider, or the funding situation worsens, consistent with the limited capital capacity of financial intermediaries. We also show that the unwinding of basis arbitrage trading can amplify mispricing by documenting that bond returns following the Lehman collapse were very low for bonds with strong preexisting basis arbitrage activity and for bonds underwritten by Lehman Brothers. Liquidity demand due to the exit of arbitrageurs can be a major driver of disruption in credit markets. This paper was accepted by Lauren Cohen, finance.

Relatively little is known about pricing in the export business, particularly how to organize and implement export pricing within firms and how these issues affect export performance. Therefore, this study investigates antecedents of export performance, specifically the organizational aspects of export pricing and price adaptation and the moderating role of export market characteristics, including export market turbulence, enforcement of contracts, and corruption ranks of the export market. Using a large-scale survey sample of 295 exporting firms in Austria and Germany and secondary data on the export markets involved, the authors show that both the intensity of internal pricing coordination and price adaptation have a positive effect on export performance. Specifically, in highly turbulent export markets, the intensity of internal pricing coordination contributes to export performance. Furthermore, a high level of horizontal dispersion of pricing authority is advisable in countries in which the enforcement of contracts is difficult.

Direct government intervention in a market may induce violations of the law of one price in other, arbitrage-related markets. I show that a government pursuing a nonpublic, partially informative price target in a model of strategic market-order trading and segmented dealership generates equilibrium price differentials among fundamentally identical assets by clouding dealers’ inference about the targeted asset’s payoff from its order flow, to an extent complexly dependent on existing price formation. I find supportive evidence using a sample of American Depositary Receipts and other cross-listings traded in the major U.S. exchanges, along with currency interventions by developed and emerging countries between 1980 and 2009.