一、主题： Government Procurement, Market Power, and Consumer Welfare: Empirical Evidence from the Infant Formula Market

二、主讲人：安永红，德州农工大学经济系助理教授（with tenure）。他在约翰霍普金斯大学获得经济学博士学位，研究领域包括微观计量和产业组织，曾在Journal of Econometrics、Journal of Business & Economic Statistics、Journal of Applied Econometrics、Applied Economics等期刊发表多篇学术论文。

三、时间：2018年6月5日（周二）,16:00-17:30

四、地点：学院南路校区主教学楼913会议室

五、主持人：王雅琦，必赢565net官网讲师

六、资助：中央财经大学引智计划资助

Abstract: The US infant formula market is highly concentrated and over one-half of the total sales are sold through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). The three major manufacturers compete not only for non-WIC consumers but also to serve WIC participants exclusively by bidding a rebate on their wholesale prices. Using data of sales and manufacturers' rebates, we investigate how the WIC program (1) affects manufacturers' pricing strategies and leads to the substantial gap between the wholesale prices and the after-rebate prices, and (2) distorts the prices paid by the non-WIC consumers. Our estimates show that manufacturers' marginal costs are much higher than the prices paid by WIC program. Nevertheless, winning a WIC contract is profitable because serving WIC participants has a substantial spillover effect (increasing 30.6% of the demand from nonparticipants), and the manufacturer's loss from WIC participants are subsidized by the increased prices for nonparticipants. We further conduct counterfactual analyses to investigate the impacts of the WIC program on non-WIC consumers.