Increased competition for viewers’ time is threatening the viability of publicservice broadcasters (PSBs) around the world. Changing regulations regarding advertising minutes might increase revenues, but little is known about the structure of advertising demand. To address this problem, we collect a unique dataset on monthly impacts (quantities) and prices of UK television channels between 2002...

Mongolia’s mass privatization program was implanted in a country that lacked the very basic institutions of capitalism. This paper examines the effects of competition and ownership on the efficiency of the newly privatized enterprises, using a representative sample of enterprises and controlling for possible selection biases. Competition has quantitatively large effects; perfectly competitive f...

This paper develops a simple framework to analyze the links between corruption and the unofficial economy and their implications for the official economy. In a model of self-selection with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, we show that the entrepreneurs’ option to flee to the underground economy constrains a corrupt official’s ability to introduce distortions to the economy for private gains. The un...

There is strong evidence that exporting firms are better. This correlation can potentially arise from many alternative casual models. In this paper, we utilise the natural experiments offered by transitioning into export in a dataset of Indian firms from 1990 to 2011, where each firm which made the transition is matched against one which did not. While exporting firms become bigger, there is no...

I add to the empirical literature on vertical contracting and wholesaler conduct by using retailer entry conditions to infer unobserved choice variables and equilibrium responses to prices and advertising. After estimating the US demand for theatrical motion pictures from 1990–96, I apply these techniques to compare observed outcomes to predictions under various distributorconduct hypotheses. W...

Using the experimental method we evaluate the Antitrust Logit Model (ALM), a merger simulation device used by U.S. antitrust authorities to help identify problematic horizontal mergers. We focus on environments with asymmetric sellers pre-merger. Our treatments include consolidations that generate merger-specific synergies, and variations in the magnitude of predicted post-merger price increase...

We study the repeal of a regulation that imposed maximum wholesale and retail markups for all but five fresh fruits and vegetables. We compare the prices of products affected by regulation before and after the policy change and use the unregulated products as a control group. We find that abolishing regulation led to a significant decrease in both retail and wholesale prices. However, markup re...

We examine how universal service provisions and price restrictions across markets impact strategic entry and pricing. We develop a simple multi-market model with an oligopolistic (profitable) urban market and entry auctions for (unprofitable) rural service. Cross-market price restrictions induce a firm operating in both markets to become a ‘softer’ competitor, thus placing the firm at a strateg...

This study uses the 1989 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement as a source of exogenous shock to product markets to establish a causal effect of competition on acquisition returns to shareholders. Following the agreement, acquirers exposed to greater increases in competitive pressure experience higher announcement returns. The positive impact of increased competition is stronger in acquirers with re...

This paper reports an experiment conducted to examine market performance and mergers in an asymmetric differentiated product oligopoly. We find that static Nash predictions organize mean market outcomes reasonably well. Markets on average respond to horizontal mergers with price increases as predicted and marginal cost synergies exert the predicted the power-mitigating price effects. Nash predi...