【Empirical Seminar】Retail Margins and Grocery Inflation
2026/10/01
研討會日期 : 2026-10-01
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Aljoscha Janssen
地點 : Conference Room B110
主持人 : Professor Han Ng
演講者簡介 : Dr. Aljoscha Janssen received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics in 2019. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at Singapore Management University. His research interests are Industrial Organization, Health Economics, Applied Microeconomics, and Behavioral Economics.
演講摘要 : In this paper I study how grocery retailers transmitted cost shocks to prices during the 2021–2023 inflation, matching wholesale costs to scanner prices for 46,000 products. Gross margins widened from 23% to nearly 29%, concentrated on the cheapest products. The mechanism is category-level repricing: a cost shock to one product triggers a category review that reprices unshocked neighbors. These reviews recur about quarterly, and most repriced products had no cost increase of their own. Spillovers explain up to three-quarters of within-category price changes; repricing follows increases more readily than decreases; and pricing constraints account for 44–61% of the cheap–premium gap.
