Three essays in empirical industrial organization

The essays in this dissertation analyze the relationship between competition, prices, quality, and financial distress.;The first essay examines how competition affects input cost transmission, focusing on Wal-Mart's pricing practices. Using weekly-store level price data between 2001 and 2006 in 12 Mexican cities, I find that Wal-Mart adjusts its prices 1/3-3 times slower to wholesale price increases than other retailers and responds 5-7 times faster to wholesale price decreases than its competitors. All retailers respond asymmetrically to wholesale cost changes. However, retailers other than Wal-Mart respond twice as fast to wholesale price increases than to decreases, while Wal-Mart behaves in the opposite way. I find no evidence that proximity to a Wal-Mart supercenter or the level of competition affects the speed of price adjustment of retailers.;The second essay analyzes whether price levels and price dispersion fall during periods of peak demand. I examine weekly prices (fees and exchange rates) of sending ;The third essay analyzes how financial distress and competition influence firms strategic decisions of the announcement and delivery of quality. The empirical context is the U.S. commercial airline industry from 1995 to 2001. First, the hypothesis that financially distressed airlines report longer flight times to improve their consumer report ranking is tested. I find that, air carriers behave in the opposite way. Second, controlling for variables that are beyond the control of carriers, the hypothesis that changes in timeliness are related to financial distress is tested. Financially distressed carriers have marginally more arrival delays. Carriers with greater market share schedule more time for flights and have more arrival delays.