Essays in industrial organization and urban economics

First two chapters of this thesis study the wholesale and retail tier of the beer supermarket sales. In the first chapter, I am interested in consolidation of distributors in the beer industry and its interaction with the uniform pricing by retailers. I build a theoretical model which illustrates how distributor consolidation in a set of counties may affect retail prices in all counties, depending on how strong the incentive of retail chains to price uniformly is. I test the predictions of the model using Nielsen scanner price data. I study two events of distributor consolidation in Ohio in 2009-2011, which followed upstream MillerCoors joint venture in 2008. In one of the events, distributor consolidation has no price effects. In another, bigger event, prices of consolidated brands (Miller, Coors, Heineken and Modelo) in treated counties increase by 0.46% relative to the control ABI brands. I find no evidence of prices in other counties being affected.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Authors dc:creator

• Popov, Anton.
• Atkin, David G., 1980-
• Chen, Keith.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nikhil Agarwal and Michael D. Whinston.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129003

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/129003