Ulrike Malmendier, Enrico Moretti, and Florian Peters collect data on all U.S. mergers from 1985 to 2009 with concurrent bids of at least two potential acquirers. They then identify the subset of contests where all bidders had a significant chance of winning: that is, long-duration contests with protracted back and forth between bidders. They find that the bidders' (stock) returns are closely aligned in the years before the contest, but they diverge after the merger: the winners underperform the losers by 50 percent over the following three years.

Using variation over time in the copayments faced by low-income enrollees in the Massachusetts’ Commonwealth Care program, Amitabh Chandra, Jon Gruber, and Robin McKnight estimate the price elasticities of demand for hospital care, prescription drug use, and outpatient care. Overall, they find that price elasticities for this low-income population are fairly similar to elasticities for higher-income populations in other settings. However, the chronically sick and older enrollees are more sensitive to price changes. While some patients cut back on use of medical services completely when copayments rise, the researchers find no (detectable) evidence of offsetting increases in hospitalizations or emergency department visits.

Using data from the eBay marketplace, and exploiting the fact that a seller's location is only revealed after the buyer has expressed interest in an item and that sales taxes vary widely from state to state, Liran Einav, Dan Knoepfle, Jon Levin, and Neel Sundaresan find that purchasing behavior is sensitive to sales taxes. They estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in a state's sales tax rate increases online purchases by state residents by a little less than 2 percent, while also decreasing online purchases from retailers in their home state by 3-4 percent.