The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board administers the purchase and sale of wine and spirits across the state and is legally mandated to charge a uniform 30% markup on all products. We use an estimated discrete choice model of demand for spirits, together with information on wholesale prices, to...

Setting a price that results in rationing may be optimal for a seller whose customers must make a specific investment to be able to use his product. Although rationing results in <MI>ex post<D> inefficiency, the resulting distribution of <MI>ex post<D> surplus compensates consumers for their...</d></mi></d></mi>

We examine regulation as a repeated game between a regulator and a utility facing a Markovian sequence of demands. Sunk capital would be expropriated by a regulator concerned only with the short-run interests of consumers. There exist rate of return regulatory policies supporting efficient...

Financial constraints are an important impediment to the growth of small businesses. We study theoretically and empirically how the financial constraints of agents affect their decisions to exert effort, and, hence the organizational decisions and growth of principals, in the context of...

Food purchases differ substantially across countries. We use detailed household level data from the US, France and the UK to (i) document these differences; (ii) estimate a demand system for food and nutrients, and (iii) simulate counterfactual choices if households faced prices and nutritional...

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluate whether increased choice increased demand elasticity faced by hospitals...

The literature on mergers between private hospitals suggests that such mergers often produce little benefit. Despite this, the UK government has pursued an active policy of hospital mergers, arguing that such consolidations will bring improvements for patients. We examine whether this promise is...

The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from non experimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a pro-competitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact of competition on hospital outcomes. The...

We present a framework for the applied analysis of dynamic games with asymmetric information. The framework consists of a definition of equilibrium, and an algorithm to compute it. Our definition of Applied Markov Perfect equilibrium is an extension of the definition of Markov Perfect...

With applied work in mind, we define an equilibrium notion for dynamic games with asymmetric information which does not require a specification for players' beliefs about their opponent types. This enables us to define equilibrium conditions which, at least in principal, are testable and can be...