Pricing, Pass-Through, and Market Intervention: Essays on Health, Retail, and Transport Economics

This dissertation analyses how government interventions, policy shocks, and structural market shifts shape pricing behavior and economic outcomes in the health, retail, and transport sectors. Across five manuscripts, the research evaluates the effects of market regulations, vertical restraints, cost shocks, and broad subsidy programs. To achieve this, it utilizes advanced econometric methods drawn from empirical industrial organization, such as difference-in-differences, staggered difference-in-differences, synthetic difference-in-differences, high-dimensional error correction models, propensity score matching, and double machine learning.

The first two manuscripts analyze the German brick-and-mortar pharmacy market, focusing on the impact of price competition, digitization, and regulation. The first manuscript evaluates the 2020 partial ban on prescription (Rx) drug rebates, revealing that while the policy successfully induced a shift in consumer behavior toward local pharmacies, the financial benefits were highly asymmetric. Ultimately, the intervention disproportionately benefited high-revenue pharmacies and proved insufficient to halt the long-term decline in the number of brick-and-mortar locations. The second manuscript investigates cost pass-through in the liberalized over-the-counter segment and for non-pharmaceuticals, documenting a rockets and feathers pricing asymmetry and systematic long-run cost overshifting. It highlights how rural pharmacies leverage spatial market power to offset lower demand and argues that pharmacies cross-subsidize their operations via the strictly regulated Rx segment, a mechanism now threatened by the digital disruption of electronic prescriptions.

The third manuscript examines the retail fuel market by evaluating the pass-through of temporary fuel tax reductions in France, Italy, and Germany following the 2022 energy crisis. The findings demonstrate a complete pass-through of tax cuts to consumers, albeit at varying speeds across countries, with retail margins normalizing quickly after a brief initial spike. While effective at immediately lowering consumer prices, the study raises critical questions regarding the fiscal efficiency, distributional fairness, and climate-economic suitability of such broad interventions.

The fourth manuscript shifts the focus to digital retail, investigating the pricing implications of the agency model versus the wholesale model for e-books on Amazon in United Kingdom. Challenging traditional antitrust perspectives on vertical restraints, the results show that delegating pricing authority to publishers under the agency model can actually decrease retail prices by approximately 20 % for niche (long-tail) titles. This suggests that this vertical restraint, similar to a Fixed Book Price system, can support market variety and make long-tail content more affordable.

The final manuscript assesses the environmental and traffic impacts of the Deutschlandticket, a nationwide public transport fare reduction in Germany. The empirical analysis reveals that this demand-side subsidy failed to induce a lasting modal shift away from private car usage, yielding only a transient reduction in extra-urban traffic during the initial summer months. These findings suggest that standalone price subsidies are highly insufficient to overcome the non-monetary costs of public transport, pointing instead to the necessity of structural, supply-side infrastructure investments.