The durability of the transportation capital stock slows down the pace of decarbonization since newer vintages feature cutting-edge technology. If older vintages were to be retired sooner, the social cost of travel would decline. This paper analyzes and explores the viability of a potential...

The behavior of firms in financial distress has attracted considerable academic and policy interest in recent years. The turmoil in the U.S. airline industry has triggered much of the public policy discussion, as some observers have argued that airlines in financial distress, particularly those...

In this paper we construct a short run model of the firm describing the behavior of thirteen U.S. airlines during the difficult transition to deregulation. Several modeling scenarios are developed to assess three common assumptions in cost studies: the use of time as a proxy for technological...

This papers analyzes dispersion in the prices that an airline charges to different customers on the same route. Such variation in airlines fares is substantial: the expected absolute difference in fares between two of an airline's passengers on a route averages thirty-six percent of the...

The safety of the commercial airline industry has attracted considerable public attention and debate since economic deregulation of the industry in 1978. These concerns have energized economic research on three aspects of airline safety. First, has the level of airline safety declined since...

A number of recent papers have studied the relationship between price and market structure in the deregulated airline industry through a cross-sectional analysis of city-pair markets. Yet, while interesting, several potential difficulties underlie the inferences drawn in these analyses. In this...

We analyze the effect of mergers on various aspects of airline performance during the period 1970-84, using a panel data set constructed by Caves et al. Estimates derived from a simple "matched pairs" statistical model indicate that these mergers were associated with reductions in unit cost. The...

This study attempts to explain the general pattern of aircraft hijacking in the U.S. between 1361 and 1976, the reasons for the dramatic reduction in hijackings after 1972, and the costs and benefits of regulation instituted in 1973 that required mandatory preboarding searches of all passengers...

We estimate a model of service choice and price competition in airline markets, allowing for the carriers that provide nonstop service to be a selected subset of the carriers competing in the market. Our model can be estimated without an excessive computational burden and we use the estimated...

This paper investigates why passengers pay substantially different fares for travel on the same airline between the same two airports. We investigate questions that are fundamentally different from those in the existing literature on airline price dispersion. We use a unique new dataset to test...