Essays in industrial organization
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The first chapter of my dissertation studies the costs and benefits of multi-outlet retails firms, or chains. Chains make up a large and growing part of the US retail sector, with significant variation across store category and geographic location. This paper quantifies the demand-side incentives to operate a network of stores as a chain: various forms of economies of scale allow chains to generate higher demand than independent firms, but at the same time chains are less flexible in customizing product selection or prices across locations. To quantitatively assess this tradeoff, I develop a simple model and estimate it using a large transaction-level dataset from a payment card company, focusing on restaurant purchases. I find that on average chains could earn 22\% more transactions if they could customize their product optimally to local tastes, but they would lose 13\% of their transactions if they were to operate as unconstrained independents. Policies that ban chain restaurants would result in a loss of consumer welfare equivalent to 1.5\% of restaurant spending and would disproportionately impact lower income consumers. Considering the endogenous entry of independent restaurants dampens the effects of chain bans by 30\%. The second chapter of my dissertation studies the potential for strategic default among borrowers during the financial crisis. Together with Nicola Pierri, we exploit a discontinuity in the eligibility criteria of the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), a large federal government program that incentivized lenders to renegotiate mortgages for borrowers who were more than 60 days delinquent on their loans. In contrast to prior literature, we find that HAMP increased rates of delinquency by about 0.5\% among eligible borrowers with much larger effects for underwater loans. At the same time, the program succeeded in its stated purpose of lowering foreclosure rates among borrowers that were already delinquent and increasing the likelihood that they return to making payments. Our results suggest that borrower strategic response is an important consideration in designing debt relief policies. Written with Johannes Dolfen, Liran Einav, Pete Klenow, Jon Levin, Larry Levin, and Wayne Best, the third chapter of my dissertation focuses on the role of e-commerce in the economy. E-Commerce represents a rapidly growing share of consumer spending in the U.S. We use transactions-level data on credit and debit cards from Visa, Inc. between 2007 and 2017 to quantify the resulting consumer surplus. We estimate that E-Commerce spending reached 8\% of consumption by 2017, yielding consumers the equivalent of a 1\% permanent boost to their consumption, or over \$1,000 per household. While some of the gains arose from saving travel costs of buying from local merchants, most of the gains stemmed from substituting to online merchants. Higher income cardholders gained more, as did consumers in more densely populated counties.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Klopack, Benjamin |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Einav, Liran |
| Thesis advisor | Einav, Liran |
| Thesis advisor | Bresnahan, Timothy F |
| Thesis advisor | Gentzkow, Matthew |
| Degree committee member | Bresnahan, Timothy F |
| Degree committee member | Gentzkow, Matthew |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Benjamin Klopack. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Benjamin Klopack
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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