We study the 1956 consent decree against the Bell System to investigate whether patents held by a dominant firm are harmful for innovation and if so, whether compulsory licensing can provide an effective remedy. The consent decree settled an antitrust lawsuit that charged Bell with having...

While often times the Hypothetical Monopolist Test (HMT) utilized in relevant market delineation is implemented with uniform price increases throughout all the goods in the candidate relevant market, since 1984 the versions of the U.S. Merger Guidelines have emphasized that these small but...

We analyze a large merger in the Dutch banking market during the financial crisis using disaggregated data. Based on a merger simulation model, we evaluate merger-induced changes in the interest rates for savings accounts. We find that the merging banks decreased interest rates by 3 to 5 percent...

We analyze the effects of the 1984 breakup of the Bell System on the rate, diversity, and direction of US innovation. In the antitrust case leading to the breakup, AT&T, the holding company of the Bell System, was accused of using exclusionary practices against competitors. The breakup was...

This study investigates the bank competition-stability nexus using a unique regulatory dataset provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank over the period 1994 to 2010. First, we use outright bank defaults as the most direct measure of bank risk available and contrast the results to weaker forms of bank...

The economics literature on Net Neutrality (NN) has been largely critical of NN regulation on the basis of theoretical findings that NN violations can be both welfare improving and welfare deteriorating, depending on the circumstances of the case in question. Thus, an ex post competition policy...

We analyze platform competition where user data is collected to improve adtargeting. Considering that users incur privacy costs, we show that the equilibrium level of data provision is distorted and can be inefficiently high or low: if overall competition is weak or if targeting benefits are...

On October 4, 2021, all services provided by Meta Platforms, Inc. (then Facebook, Inc.) became unavailable unexpectedly for all its worldwide users for a period of about six hours. We use detailed high‐frequency tracking data from smartphones, tablets and desktop computers of thousands of Meta...

We study how the threat of entry affects service quantity and quality of general prac- titioners (GPs). We leverage Germany’s needs-based primary care planning system, in which the likelihood of new GPs reduces by 20 percentage points when primary care coverage exceeds a cut-off. We compile...