Julian Kozlowski

Retail Prices: New Evidence from Argentina

We compile a new database of grocery prices in Argentina with over 9 million observations per day. Our main novel finding is that products’ prices almost do not vary within stores of a chain (i.e., uniform pricing). We also find that prices do not change significantly with regional conditions or shocks, particularly so for chains that operate in many regions. To study the impact of uniform pricing on both consumers and firms, this paper uses a tractable model based on the trade literature. Motivated by our empirical findings, each firm has to set a unique price in both regions. Relative to a counterfactual in which firms can set different prices across regions (i.e., flexible pricing), uniform pricing reduces firm’s profits by 0.7%. Consumers, however, prefer uniform pricing and are willing to give up 3.8% of their income to avoid flexible pricing in the baseline model. The effect on consumers, however, depends on how much uniform pricing limits firms’ power to extract consumer surplus and how heterogeneous the regions are.We create a new database of retail prices in Argentina with over 10 million observations per day. Our main novel finding is that, different from Kaplan, Menzio, Rudanko, and Trachter (2016), chains, rather than stores, explain most of the price variation in our data. We show this in three ways: (a) Even though chains have on average 158 stores, there are on average less than 2.5 unique prices per product by chain; (b) Among products that change prices in one store, the probability that other stores of the same chain also change the price of the same product in the same day is 2.4 times the probability for other stores of any chain; and (c) A formal variance decomposition shows that only 28% of the price dispersion (for the same product, day, and city) is explained by stores setting different prices within a chain. This finding is relevant for retail-pricing theories since there are significantly fewer chains than stores, which matters for the degree of competition in the market. This paper also studies the heterogeneity in price changes and price dispersion across product categories.

Stylized Facts on the Organization of Small Business Partnerships

The authors study the internal organization of small business partnerships and focus on the number of owners and ownership structure and the dynamics of these variables. They find that partnerships tend to have a small number of owners with equal distribution of ownership shares. Moreover, while partnerships with equally distributed shares tend to keep this distribution constant, those with unequally distributed shares tend to move toward more equal distribution over time. The authors highlight that these facts are in line with the theory of private information in small business partnerships proposed by Espino, Kozlowski, and Sanchez (2014).