Variety Competition in Retail Outlets, 2007 (Job Market Paper, in progress)

Choose when choices are limited, 2007 (in progress)
What are the effects of choice sets on choices made? This paper investigates the effects of availability constraints on consumer substitution patterns using scanner data. In particular, I explore the variation in products available in different stores and estimate the demand store by store. I then compare the substitution patterns across stores and test a series of hypothesis including the Independence of Irrelevant Alternative assumption.

WIC and its spillover effects, 2007 (with Jeff Perloff, in submission)
Previous studies argue that WIC (The Special Nutrional Program for Women, Infants and Children) enables price discrimination by removing low-income consumers from the out-of-the-pocket market. We believe that the explanation is based on demand spillover. The WIC contract winning brand is given more retail shelf space, which leads to increased demand by non-WIC customers. Our empirical study provides strong support for our alternative explanation. This research is important because it explains why the actual price differentials between WIC and non-WIC markets are much larger than those explained by price discrimination.

AIDS, Life Expectancy and Human Capital Accumulation, 2006 (with Lilyan Fulginiti and E. Wesley F. Peterson, in submission)
A three-period overlapping-generations model is developed to investigate the impact on human capital investment decisions and income growth of lowered life expectancy as a result of diseases such as HIV/AIDS. We show that an increased probability of premature death leads to less investment in human capital, and consequently slower growth. We also empirically investigate the effect of HIV/AIDS on life expectancy in Sub-Saharan Africa and the role of health in the level of educational investments and growth for a broader set of countries. The empirical results show that HIV/AIDS has resulted in a substantial decline in life expectancy in African countries and falling life expectancies are indeed associated with lower educational attainment and slower economic growth world wide.

Publications

Effects of Sales on Brand Loyalty, 2006 (with Jeffrey M. Perloff, and Sofia B. Villas-Boas), Journal of Agricultural & Food Industrial Organization, Vol 4, No.1, Article 5

Many theoretical and empirical models on sales maintain a key assumption that there is an exogenous mass of consumers loyal to certain brands. However, using household purchase data, we find that the variation in the shares of private label, major and minor national brands can be explained to a great extent by sales frequencies of these brands. Our key findings are that consumers are not very brand loyal and that the degree of their loyalty depends on the frequency of sales and consumer demographics.