The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) controls the purchase and sale of alcoholic beverages across the state and is legally mandated to charge a uniform 30% mark-up on all products. This paper investigates the welfare implications of this uniform markup. We show that consumption patterns...

We explore the sensitivity of the U.S. government's ongoing incentive auction to multi-license ownership by broadcasters. We document significant broadcast TV license purchases by private equity firms prior to the auction and perform a prospective analysis of the effect of ownership...

Both asymmetric information (AI) and divergent expectations (DE) theories offer possible explanations of the litigation puzzle. Under DE, cases proceed to trial when, by chance, the plaintiff is more optimistic than the defendant. As the fraction of cases tried (T) declines, this leads to a...

Recent literature notes that when quality is produced with fixed costs, a high quality firm can undercut its rival's prices and may find it profitable to invest more in quality as market size grows large. As a result, a market can remain concentrated even as it grows large. When quality is...

Radio signals are pure public goods whose total value to society is the sum of their value to advertisers and listeners. Because broadcasters can capture only part of the value of their product as revenue, there is the potential for a classic problem of underprovision. Small markets have much...

In theory, free entry can lead to social inefficiency. When new products are substitutes for existing products, the business stolen from incumbents places a wedge between private and social benefits of entry. The business stealing effect can be offset if entry reduces prices or increases...

Nonprofits are increasingly present in industries with a large for-profit sector, raising questions about their competitive advantage afforded by the nonprofit tax exemption. We estimate an equilibrium model of market structure for recreation/fitness centers to assess whether nonprofit and...

We explore the implications of ownership concentration for the recently-concluded incentive auction that re-purposed spectrum from broadcast TV to mobile broadband usage in the U.S. We document significant multi-license ownership of TV stations. We show that in the reverse auction, in which TV...

The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board administers the purchase and sale of wine and spirits and is mandated to charge a uniform 30% markup on all products. We use an estimated discrete choice model of demand for spirits, together with information on wholesale prices, to assess the implications...

Local telecommunications competition was an important goal of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. We evaluate the consumer welfare effects of entry into residential local telephone service in New York State using household-level data from September 1999 to March 2003. We address the prevalence of...