Working Papers

How practitioners model competition influences the predicted effects of a merger. We consider three models that are commonly used to evaluate horizontal mergers: Bertrand price setting, second score

A popular proposal to address the rising cost of higher education in the United States has been to provide tuition-free access to community colleges. This paper examines the effect of such a policy on

This paper assesses the impact of an educational program designed by the Federal Trade Commission to teach advertising literacy to children ages 8-12. In a randomized experiment, children who played

In 2018, Agrium and PotashCorp merged to become the world’s largest manufacturer of potash, from which potassium is extracted for use as one of the three main nutrients in agricultural fertilizer. The

The net effect of vertical integration on consumer welfare depends on the magnitude of the price reductions resulting from the elimination of double marginalization at the integrated firm and the

This paper analyzes whether postsecondary training programs have kept up with shifts in the occupational structure of the labor market over the past decades. I compare long-term trends in the

One technique employed by budget-conscious researchers is to pay only some of the subjects for their choices in an experiment. We test the effect of paying some subjects versus paying all subjects in

We consider how technologies that eliminate sources of demand uncertainty change the character and prevalence of coordinated conduct. Our results show that mechanisms that reduce firms' uncertainty

University decisions can have lasting effects on students in the labor market; however, little is known about how these decisions are made. This paper develops a new framework for empirically

Using commercial claims for 2012-2013 from Colorado’s All-Payer Claims Database, we examine how medical service prices vary for five hospital-based procedures and the complexity adjusted inpatient

Merging firms regularly argue that mergers involving capacity-constrained firms are unlikely to be anticompetitive, because the incentive for the merged firm to raise prices and reduce quantity may

We consider whether hospital acquisitions of physicians lead to improved clinical outcomes for Medicare patients aged 65 and older. The analysis combines 2005-2012 Medicare fee-for-service and

I use a large database of millions of complaints to examine how per-capita complaint rates vary across communities, as well as heterogeneity in complaining across different agencies and consumer

In retail and health care markets, demand declines with geographic distance to the establishment, but either transport costs or preferences correlated with distance (“home bias”) could cause this

We assess the performance of three hospital merger simulation methods by means of a Monte Carlo experiment. We first specify a rich theoretical model of hospital markets and use it to generate “true”

Physicians’ practices vary widely, as do their effectiveness and reimbursement. Using a merger of six orthopaedic groups in southeastern Pennsylvania, we find that such groups can generate large, anti

This paper attempts to add to the understanding of what makes consumers more likely to become victims of fraud.  More specifically, we sought to identify personal characteristics that were correlated

Beginning in 1997, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allowed television advertisements to make major statements about a prescription drug, while referring to detailed drug information on the

The benefits of an investment in an energy efficient durable good depend on the life of the investment. If the expected length of ownership is mis-estimated, this will bias calculations of the

Despite their widespread usage, little is known about the predictive accuracy of different discrete choice demand models. To evaluate their performance, we use a series of natural disasters that