Price transparency initiatives are typically undertaken by third parties to ensure that consumers can compare the prices of competing offers in markets in which obtaining such information is costly. Such practices have recently become widespread, yet it is unclear whether the increased price competition due to lower search costs overcomes the potential for collusion between competitors due to lower price coordination costs. Motivated by this question, the authors investigate the effect of mandatory price posting (on large electronic signs) on the pricing behavior of competing gas stations in the Italian highway system. The authors find that when prices are posted, the average price of gasoline decreases by 1 euro cent per liter, which represents about 20% of stations’ margins. About half the price decrease can be attributed to the introduction of a sign posting a station's own price and those of its nearest neighbors, with the other half due to the introduction of other signs posting the prices of other stations on the same road. Despite the price reduction, however, the introduction of signs seems to have little impact on price dispersion, suggesting that price uncertainty persists even after the policy is implemented. Analysis of customer transaction data confirms this finding, showing that less than 10% of consumers use the posted price information effectively.

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We document that nearly half of the global decline in agricultural employment was driven by new cohorts entering the labor market. A new dataset of policy reforms supports an interpretation of these cohort effects as human capital. Using a model of frictional labor reallocation, we conclude that human capital growth led to a sharp decline in the agricultural labor supply, accounting, at fixed prices, for 40 percent of the decrease in agricultural employment. This aggregate effect is halved in general equilibrium and it reflects the role of human capital as both a mediating factor and an independent driver of labor reallocation. (JEL J22, J24, J43, L16, O13, O14, Q10)

Despite criticisms regarding their effectiveness, reward programs today represent a prevalent and apparently successful form of marketing investment for several industries such as airlines, hotels, gas stations, and credit cards. To understand what might contribute to their success, this paper investigates the purchase behavior of consumers who participate in a reward program from the travel industry. We estimate a dynamic demand model of gasoline purchase, and compare the value that consumers attach to rewards with the value they attach to the money spent for gasoline. We find that there exists a significant portion of frequent travelers who extract more value from one dollar’s worth of rewards than from one dollar spent for gasoline. Most of the effectiveness of the reward program is due to the behavior of these consumers. Their insensitivity to price induces firms to increase fuel prices by 1 euro cent per liter, which corresponds to about 10% increase in their margins. The program also contributes to softening competition, increasing margins by 4%. The web appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2821 . This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing.

I study how the relative efficiency of high- and low-skill labor varies across countries. Using microdata for countries at different stages of development, I document that differences in relative quantities and wages are consistent with high-skill workers being relatively more productive in rich countries. I exploit variation in the skill premia of foreign-educated migrants to discriminate between two possible drivers of this pattern: cross-country differences in the skill bias of technology and in the relative human capital of skilled labor. I find that the former is quantitatively more important, and discuss the implications of this result for development accounting. (JEL I26, J24, J31, J61, L16, O15)