For decades, economists have encouraged regulators to implement more efficient telephone pricing policies in order to eliminate the pervasive cross-subsidies from usage-based services to basic connections. Slowly, and reluctantly, regulators have moved in this direction. The most recent...

Countries around the world are increasingly concerned as to whether the adoption of broadband technology by their respective citizens is sufficient to support economic growth and social development. Unfortunately, such concerns are often expressed in terms of where a country ranks among its...

One goal of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (“ARRA”) is to provide all Americans with access to affordable broadband services, particularly to those Americans living in rural markets where demand and cost conditions do not favor network deployment. At the same time, there...

In this POLICY PAPER, we show how the Federal Communications Commission’s regulatory process may be used to impede the efficient functioning of a secondary market for commercial spectrum. In particular, we show that imposing (and threatening to impose) significant conditions when firms seek to...

With the National Broadband Plan’s promise of an additional 500 MHz of spectrum for commercial purposes, the question of how to allocate those resources among competing uses and users will dominate the communications policy debate over the coming years. In this policy paper, we provide a...

With the D.C. Circuit’s ruling in Comcast v. FCC, the court has thrown the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to promote an “Open Internet” into legal limbo. In response, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced that he intended to seek to impose a “Third Way”, whereby the...

In the regulatory setting of rates for statutory-licensed music services, the question of value-based versus cost-based rate setting for the component-rights of a musical performance arises. In this article, we have demonstrated this value-or-cost question is a distinction without a difference....

With the rising cost of broadcast programming and the high-profile of “blackouts,” Retransmission Consent has earned a place at the forefront of the modern communications policy debate. To provide a framework under which to evaluate the issue, we present in this PAPER an economic theory of...

Over the past twenty years we have seen the emergence of an important phenomenon in the practice of modern regulation — cooperative bargaining between the regulator and the regulated over a “bundle” of seemingly unrelated issues. Because of the multiplicity of issues being adjudicated...