I examine the source and welfare implications of differences in household consumption diversity. I document the existence of a positive correlation between household variety and expenditure to motivate a simple framework where households purchase more varieties to counteract diminishing returns to quantity but face location-specific costs of accessing variety. Estimating the model with Indian household data, I find that the increase in dietary diversity between 1983 and 2009 was mostly due to lower costs of accessing variety, which resulted in large welfare gains. Urban households also benefit from a lower cost of accessing varieties than rural households.

We examine the extent to which vertical and horizontal market structure can together explain incomplete retail pass-through. To answer this question, we use scanner data from a large U.S. retailer to estimate product level pass-through for three vertical structures: national brands, private label goods not manufactured by the retailer, and private label goods manufactured by the retailer. Our approach circumvents issues associated with internal firm prices and demonstrates that accounting for horizontal market structure is important for measuring the effects of vertical integration and reduced double marginalization on pass-through.

Standard models of hierarchy assume that agents and middle managers are better informed than principals. We estimate the value of the informational advantage held by supervisors—middle managers—when ministerial leadership—the principal—introduced a new monitoring technology aimed at improving the performance of agricultural extension agents (AEAs) in rural Paraguay. Our approach employs a novel experimental design that elicited treatment‐priority rankings from supervisors before randomization of treatment. We find that supervisors have valuable information—they prioritize AEAs who would be more responsive to the monitoring treatment. We develop a model of monitoring under different scales of treatment roll‐out and different treatment allocation rules. We semiparametrically estimate marginal treatment effects (MTEs) to demonstrate that the value of information and the benefits to decentralizing treatment decisions depend crucially on the sophistication of the principal and on the scale of roll‐out.

Relative cross-border retail prices, in a common currency, comove closely with the nominal exchange rate. Using product-level prices and wholesale costs from a grocery chain operating in the United States and Canada, we decompose this variation into relative costs and markup components. The high correlation of nominal and real exchange rates is driven mainly by changes in relative costs. National borders segment markets. Retail prices respond to changes in costs in neighboring stores within the same country but not across the border. Prices have a median discontinuous change of 24 percent at the border and 0 percent at state boundaries. (JEL F31, L11, L81)