IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedawp/2011-03.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Price discrimination and business-cycle risk

Author

Abstract

A parsimonious theoretical model of second degree price discrimination suggests that the business cycle will affect the degree to which firms are able to price-discriminate between different consumer types. We analyze price dispersion in the airline industry to assess how price discrimination can expose airlines to aggregate-demand fluctuations. Performing a panel analysis on seventeen years of data covering two business cycles, we find that price dispersion is highly procyclical. Estimates show that a rise in the output gap of 1 percentage point is associated with a 1.9 percent increase in the interquartile range of the price distribution in a market. These results suggest that markups move procyclically in the airline industry, such that during booms in the cycle, firms can significantly raise the markup charged to those with a high willingness to pay. The analysis suggests that this impact on firms' ability to price-discriminate results in additional profit risk, over and above the risk that comes from variations in cost.

Suggested Citation

  • Marco Cornia & Kristopher Gerardi & Adam Hale Shapiro, 2011. "Price discrimination and business-cycle risk," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 2011-03, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedawp:2011-03
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.frbatlanta.org/documents/pubs/wp/wp1103.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Burnside, Craig & Eichenbaum, Martin & Rebelo, Sergio, 1993. "Labor Hoarding and the Business Cycle," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 101(2), pages 245-273, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Juan Pablo Herrera Saavedra & Jacobo Campo Robledo & Natalia Cantor Vargas & Jenny-Paola Lis-Gutiérrez, 2013. "Una propuesta metodológica de discriminación de segundo grado: el caso de tarifas multiclase para el registro marcario en Colombia durante el ano 2012," Estudios Económicos SIC 10746, Superintendencia de Industria y Comercio.
    2. Juan Pablo Herrera Saavedra & Natalia Cantor Vargas & Jenny Paola Lis Gutiérrez & Jacobo Alberto Campo Robledo, 2014. "Discriminación de precios de segundo grado: el caso de tarifas multi-clase para el registro marcario en Colombia," Revista Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, Universidad Militar Nueva Granada, vol. 0(1), pages 63-78, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Evans, Charles L. & Marshall, David A., 2007. "Economic determinants of the nominal treasury yield curve," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(7), pages 1986-2003, October.
    2. Kevin E. Beaubrun-Diant & Julien Matheron, 2008. "Rentabilités d'actifs et fluctuations économiques : une perspective d'équilibre général dynamique et stochastique," Economie & Prévision, La Documentation Française, vol. 0(2), pages 35-63.
    3. Yongsung Chang & Mark Bils, 2002. "Cyclical Movements in Hours and Effort under Sticky Wages," Macroeconomics 0204004, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Jordi Galí & Thijs van Rens, 2021. "The Vanishing Procyclicality of Labour Productivity [Why have business cycle fluctuations become less volatile?]," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 131(633), pages 302-326.
    5. Fabio Verona & Maik Wolters, 2014. "Sticky Information Models in Dynare," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 43(3), pages 357-370, March.
    6. Eric R. Sims, 2016. "Differences in Quarterly Utilization-Adjusted TFP by Vintage, with an Application to News Shocks," NBER Working Papers 22154, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Daehaeng Kim & Chul-In Lee, 2007. "On-the-Job Human Capital Accumulation in a Real Business Cycle Model: Implications for Intertemporal Substitution Elasticity and Labor Hoarding," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 10(3), pages 494-518, July.
    8. Pascal Michaillat & Emmanuel Saez, 2015. "Aggregate Demand, Idle Time, and Unemployment," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 130(2), pages 507-569.
    9. Rahman, Pk. Md. Motiur & Yamagata, Tatsufumi, 2004. "Business Cycles and Seasonal Cycles in Bangladesh," IDE Discussion Papers 1, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization(JETRO).
    10. Régis Barnichon, 2009. "The Shimer puzzle and the identification of productivity shocks," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2009-04, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    11. Luca Benati, 2001. "Band-pass filtering, cointegration, and business cycle analysis," Bank of England working papers 142, Bank of England.
    12. Balke, Nathan S. & Wynne, Mark A., 2000. "An equilibrium analysis of relative price changes and aggregate inflation," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 45(2), pages 269-292, April.
    13. Galeotti, Marzio & Maccini, Louis J. & Schiantarelli, Fabio, 2005. "Inventories, employment and hours," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 52(3), pages 575-600, April.
    14. Pengfei Wang & Yi Wen, 2006. "Solving linear difference systems with lagged expectations by a method of undetermined coefficients," Working Papers 2006-003, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    15. Laamanen, Tomi, 2005. "Dependency, resource depth, and supplier performance during industry downturn," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 125-140, March.
    16. Andres Arias & Gary Hansen & Lee Ohanian, 2007. "Why have business cycle fluctuations become less volatile?," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 32(1), pages 43-58, July.
    17. Dennis Wesselbaum, 2020. "How Large Are Firing Costs? A Cross-Country Study," Applied Economics Quarterly (formerly: Konjunkturpolitik), Duncker & Humblot GmbH, Berlin, vol. 66(4), pages 319-328.
    18. Bils, Mark & Cho, Jang-Ok, 1994. "Cyclical factor utilization," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 319-354, April.
    19. Marianne Baxter & Robert G. King, 1991. "Productive externalities and business cycles," Discussion Paper / Institute for Empirical Macroeconomics 53, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    20. Craig Burnside & Martin Eichenbaum & Sergio Rebelo, 1995. "Capital Utilization and Returns to Scale," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1995, Volume 10, pages 67-124, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedawp:2011-03. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Rob Sarwark (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbatus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.