A growing literature has emphasized the role of Melitz-type firm heterogeneity within sectors in accounting for nominal earnings inequality. This paper instead explores the implications of firm heterogeneity for household price indices across the income distribution. Using detailed matched US home and store scanner microdata that allow us to trace the firm size distribution into the consumption...

Pricing is one of the most crucial determinants of sales. Besides the actual price, how the price offering is presented to consumers also affects consumer evaluation of the product offering. Many studies focus on “price framing,” i.e., how the offer is communicated to the consumer –is the offered price given along with a reference price, is the reference price plausible, is a price deal communi...

CROSS-NATIONAL PRICE DIFFERENCES: HOW REAL AND HOW LARGE? Flawed Studies Overstate Differentials The view that drug prices are much higher in the United States than in other countries has been fueled by studies that have attempted to compare drug prices in several congressional districts with prices in Canada and Mexico. One such study was issued in 1998 by the Committee on Government Reform an...

How can social epistemology (SE) be characterized so that all of these topics fit under its umbrella? Why does each topic qualify as epistemology and in what respects is it social? This paper begins by proposing a tripartite division of SE. Under this classification scheme the first variety of SE is highly continuous with traditional epistemology, whereas the second and third varieties diverge ...

Current developments in the area of research information have led to two different kinds of systems dealing with research-related information: Social networking tools for researchers have reached public attention through reports in mass as well as popular scientific media. Rather hidden from the public focus, universities and governments have pushed the implementation of institutional and natio...

Equivalence of measurement scales is a crucial prerequisite for making valid cross-cultural comparisons, as cultural differences in the interpretation of indicators could result in misleading conclusions. In this paper, we empirically assess the cross-national measurement equivalence of four scales that are included in the European Social Survey, round 1 (2002– 03). These four scales, referring...

Domulti-level selection explanations of the evolutionof social traits deepen the understanding provided by single-level explanations? Central tomultilevel explanations is a mathematical theorem, the multi-level Price decomposition. I build a framework through which to understand the explanatory role of such non-empirical decompositions in scienti c practice. Applying this general framework to t...

Asynchronous online forums such as FirstClass are frequently used in many educational settings to link networks of learners. They offer opportunities for knowledge-building dialogue and for the exchange of learning resources, but many students struggle to make effective use of them. Researchers have therefore been concerned to investigate how learners successfully build knowledge together in on...

We analyze a model of market competition in which two identical firms choose prices as well as how to present, or “frame”, their products. A consumer is randomly assigned to one firm, and whether he makes a price comparison with the other firm is a probabilistic function of the firms’ framing strategies. We analyze Nash equilibria in this model. In particular, we show how the answers to the fol...

This paper studies the relationship of financial development and income inequality in China over the period of 1978-2013. Using the structural vector auto-regression (SVAR), the empirical results are consistent with the GJ hypothesis of an inverted U-shaped relationship between financial development and income inequality. An economy in its initial stages of financial development would present i...