The 9th Econ Job Market Best Paper Award, a competition launched by the UnitCredit Foundation in cooperation with the European Economic Association, is aimed at all PhD candidates and graduates attending the European Job Market for Economists in 2022.
The winners of this year's edition will be awarded the prize at the European Job Market for Economists in December 2022. Prizes have been awarded to five outstanding Job Market papers on topics related to general economic subjects.
Economics researcher Lukas Nord is amongst the recipients of the 2022 award for his paper, Shopping, Demand Composition, and Equilibrium Prices.
The paper studies how retailers adjust the prices they set in response to how much households search for bargains. The motivation for the paper is that even an exactly identical product sells at different prices across supermarkets at any given point in time. Households differ in how much they exploit these price differences: poor households shop more for bargains and therefore pay less for exactly the same good. These differences in prices paid are important, because they imply that a € spent by a poor household buys more consumption than a € spent by the rich. Hence, such price differences reduce inequality in consumption relative to spending and income.
In the paper, Nord shows that the response of posted prices to differences in households' shopping behaviour doubles previous estimates of how much price differences reduce inequality in consumption. This is because rich and poor households buy different baskets of goods and retailers set different prices across products based on the buyers they face.
In addition, the paper shows that differences in households' search for bargains help explain why retail prices respond little to aggregate fluctuations in unemployment but strongly to house price changes.
Lukas Nord's research interests focus on Quantitative Macroeconomics. He studies how heterogeneous households respond to individual and aggregate risks and how search frictions shape outcomes in goods and labour markets.