Since the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act (1897) and the Sherman Act (1890), regulation and antitrust have operated as competing mechanisms to control competition. Regulation produced cross-subsidies and favors to special interests, but specified prices and rules of mandatory dealing....

The Affordable Care Act Marketplaces were introduced in 2014 as part of a reform of the U.S. individual health insurance market. While the individual market represents a small slice of the U.S. population, it has historically been the market segment with the lowest rates of take-up and greatest...

We study how political factors shape competition in the mobile telecommunication sector. We show that the way a government designs the rules of the game has an impact on concentration, competition, and prices. Pro-competition regulation reduces prices, but does not hurt quality of services or...

We show that stricter bank liquidity standards can trigger unintended credit booms when there is heterogeneity in interbank pricing power. Attempts to circumvent the regulation change the allocation of savings across institutions, eliciting strategic responses that also change the allocation of...

This paper examines the role of regulation and competition in generic markets. Generics offer large potential savings to payers and consumers of pharmaceuticals. Whether the potential savings are realized depends on the extent of generic entry and uptake and the level of generic prices. In the...

The audit market's unique combination of features-its role in capital market transparency, mandated demand, and concentrated supply-means it receives considerable attention from policymakers. We explore the effects of two market scenarios that have been the focus of policy discussions: a)...

Regulations aimed at curbing the entry of large retail stores have been introduced in many countries to protect independent retailers. Analyzing a planning reform launched in the United Kingdom in the 1990s, I show that independent retailers were actually harmed by the creation of entry barriers...

Can patent protection and product market competition complement each other in enhancing incentives to innovate? In this paper, we address this question by investigating how innovation responses to a substantial policy initiative increasing product market competition interact with the strength of...

Despite all of the talk about deregulation' of the electricity sector, a large number of non-market mechanisms have been imposed on emerging competitive wholesale and retail markets. These mechanisms include spot market price caps, operating reserve requirements, non-price rationing protocols,...

Based on an endogenous growth model, we show that intermediate goods markets imperfections can curb incentives to improve productivity downstream. We confirm such prediction by estimating a model of multifactor productivity growth in which the effects of upstream competition vary with distance...