Views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Board or its staff. We thank participants at the Brookings Webinar on "COVID-19 and the Financial System-How and Why Were Financial Markets Disrupted?" for helpful comments and discussions. Jacob Faber provided excellent research assistance. Itay Goldstein has been retained by a law firm as an expert on a case involving a liquidity crisis and government intervention in a European bank. This case has not influenced the research in this paper, and the research in this paper has not influenced the case. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
for their helpful comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
Although typically overlooked, many purchase datasets exhibit a high incidence of products with zero sales. We propose a new estimator for the Random-Coefficients Logit demand system for purchase datasets with zero-valued market shares. The identification of the demand parameters is based on a pairwise-differencing approach that constructs moment conditions based on differences in demand between pairs of products. The corresponding estimator corrects nonparametrically for the potential selection of the incidence of zeros on unobserved aspects of demand. The estimator also corrects for the potential endogeneity of marketing variables both in demand and in the selection propensities. Monte Carlo simulations show that our proposed estimator provides reliable small-sample inference both with and without selection-onunobservables. In an empirical case study, the proposed estimator not only generates different demand estimates than approaches that ignore selection in the incidence of zero shares, it also generates better out-of-sample fit of observed retail contribution margins.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.