Research 

Working Paper

"Fighting for Fares: Uber and the Declining Market Price of Licensed Taxicabs," with Derek Stacey (under review)

Link to Paper

In this paper, we study how the emergence of Uber in a large North American city affects the financial value of taxicab licenses. A taxicab license provides a claim to a stream of dividends in the form of rents generated by operating the taxicab or leasing the license. The introduction of Uber undoubtedly affects the anticipated stream of dividends because Uber drivers capture part of the farebox revenue that might otherwise go to the owners/drivers of licensed taxicabs. At the same time, the launch of Uber's innovative technology-driven approach to the provision of ride-hailing services can be viewed as a partial obsolescence of the traditional taxicab approach. The economic incentives facing market participants may therefore change as Uber gains momentum in the ride-hailing market, which could further affect the market value of licensed taxicabs. Using transaction-level data, we apply a theory of asset pricing to the secondary market for Toronto taxicab licenses to explore these potential price effects. We learn that both the farebox and innovation effects contribute to the overall decline in market value, with the farebox effect accounting for just over half of the $170K price decline from 2011 to 2017. We explore the welfare implications for taxicab license owners with counterfactual simulations. We find that, consistent with the anti-Uber protests organized by Toronto taxi drivers, there was a high willingness to pay among license holders to prevent or postpone the launch of Uber's ridesharing services.

Work in Progress

"Allocative Price Posting, Noisy Matching and Heterogeneous Sellers" 

In this paper, I study the allocative role of posted pricing in a setting where search and matching frictions generate price dispersion both within and across market segments. I extend Shi's (2020) framework of Sequentially Mixed Search to include two types of sellers that differ in the cost of producing a good. The model has three key elements: directed search, noisy matching, and seller heterogeneity. Prices may or may not play an allocative role, depending on whether posted price dispersion across market segments directs buyers' search, as in standard directed search, or if price dispersion within market segments undermines endogenous separation. In a separating equilibrium, distinct market segments emerge that can be thought of as alternative available exchange platforms (e.g. Multiple Listing Service or For-Sale-By-Owner in the housing market) that attract buyers and sellers to conduct economic transactions. In a pooling equilibrium, sellers and buyers enter a single market segment, as in standard random or noisy search environments wherein prices are non-allocative. As market segmentation is endogenous and potentially incomplete, the framework is useful for studying the effects of policies that change the sorting of buyers and sellers across platforms in equilibrium, and thus the overall efficiency of the market.

"Recovering Search- and Seller-Cost Heterogeneity from Advertised and Transaction Prices"