In this paper, we investigate empirically the effect of two recent domestic airline alliances. We find that both alliances benefited consumers - average fares fell and total traffic increased after the creation of the alliances on those city pairs affected by the alliances. We also find that...

Consider a durable goods producer that potentially has market power in the aftermarkets associated with its products. An important question is to what extent, if any, should the antitrust laws restrict the firm's behavior in these aftermarkets? In this paper we explore a number of models...

Competition and prospective payment systems have been widely used to attempt to control health care costs. Though much of the increase in medical costs over the past half-century has been concentrated among a few high-cost users of health care,prospective payment systems may provide incentives...

When there are peer effects in education, private schools have an incentive to vary tuition to attract relatively able students. Epple and Romano (1998) develop a general equilibrium model characterizing equilibrium pricing and student selection into schools when peer effects are present. The...

This paper investigates whether schools that face stronger choice-based incentives have greater demand for certain teacher characteristics and (if so) which teacher characteristics. Schools that face choice-based incentives should demand teachers who raise a schools' ability to attract students....

This paper examines the attitude of Jewish law to competition in light of the economist's understanding of the benefits of competition and of the beneficiaries from intervention in the competitive process. The punchline of this paper is simple. Although Judaism has used a whole host of...

To study the effects of ability grouping on school competition, we develop a theoretical and computational model of tracking in public and private schools. We examine tracking's consequences for the allocation of students of differing abilities and income within and between public and private...

The folk wisdom is that competition reduces agency costs. We provide indirect empirical support for this view. We argue that the temptation to retain cash and engage in less productive activities is more severe for firms in less competitive industries. Hence an unanticipated increase in...

We explore the effects of two kinds of competition on the cost of capital in the tax-exempt bond market: (1) competition amongst underwriters and (2) competition amongst issuers (most of which are quasi-public special authorities sanctioned by state governments). The first kind of...