Recent rate increases by U.S. freight railroads have refocused attention on regulation, deregulation, and regulatory reforms in the railroad industry. Legislation introduced into Congress would render a variety of railroad behavior newly subject to the jurisdiction of the antitrust statutes,...

We model a “new economy” industry where innovation is sequential and monopoly is persistent but the incumbent turns over periodically. In this setting we analyze the effects of “extraction” (e.g., price discrimination that captures greater surplus) and “extension” (conduct that...

The theoretical literature of industrial organization shows that the distances between consumers and firms have first-order implications for competitive outcomes whenever transportation costs are large. To assess these effects empirically, we develop a structural model of competition among...

Newspaper Joint Operating Agreements (JOAs) are long term, inflexible contracts between metropolitan daily newspapers in the same market. These contracts maintain two editorial voices while combining all business operations of the two competitors in order to capture many of the scale economies...

One important issue facing reformers considering the restructuring of the seaports and freight railways sectors of a developing country is the creation of competition ­ or, alternatively, avoiding the creation or preservation of monopoly power. In seaports a crucial distinction is often that...

Freight railway enterprises in both Europe and North America are in the process of significant restructuring, with EC policy changes dictating new ownership, organization, and cooperation arrangements in Europe and a series of major mergers having already led to highly concentrated regional...

Economists sometimes decry the persistence with which firms set prices above marginal cost and thus, according to the economists, fail to maximize profits. But it is the economists who have it wrong – first, because variable accounting costs are not always a good proxy for marginal economic...

The regulatory oversight of the private Medicare Advantage (MA) program makes the role of competition in this market unclear. This paper empirically examines the impact of competition by measuring the effects of changes in market structure on enrollment. The study examines competition in local...

With the increased number of firms that are in some form of serious financial distress, once financing becomes more readily available to potential acquirers we might expect an increase in both the number and share of mergers where at least one of the parties is having difficulty staying afloat...

We model competition between two firms in a vertical upstream-downstream relationship. Each firm can pay a sunk cost to enter the other’s market. For equilibria in which both firms enter, the downstream price can be lower than the joint profit maximizing level, and coordination (e.g., through...