Cost synergies are an explicitly recognized justification for a two-firm merger, and empirical techniques are now widely used to assess the impact of cost-reducing mergers on prices and welfare in the post-merger market. We show that if the merger occurs in a vertically product differentiated...

Inflation at the time of the 1992 election was at its lowest level in 20 years. This fact might have been expected to give the incumbent Administration a significant advantage, since most previous research regarding voters’ economic preferences has found that American voters have a strong...

We use a new data set to examine the equity price impact of announced cartel investigations. Unlike prior research, we estimate normal returns using the Fama-French (1993) three-factor model. We find that cartel investigation announcements have a long-lasting negative share-price effect of two...

When advertising is a value-enhancing complement to consumption [Becker and Murphy (1993)], customization can permit firms to discriminate in advertising strategies, rather than in pricing. We investigate customized complementary advertising in a spatial model of horizontal differentiation. We...

We examine the impact of targeted advertising on competition and welfare when advertising directly affects the consumer’s utility, as in Becker and Murphy (1993). We show that as targeted advertising becomes less costly, market concentration and prices increase. Yet consumer welfare also...

We examine charitable spending by faith-based organizations on community services. We find that government spending on such activities has a depressing or "crowding out" effect as initially found in Hungerman (2005). However, we also find that competition from other faith-based organizations...