Tag: Bureau of Economics

One of the puzzles about the recent steel VRAs is whether they limited imports toward the end of the 1980s. The 36 percent depreciation of the dollar between 1984 and 1989 is believed to have rendered...

The U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission Merger Guidelines assume that entry that is likely and sufficient will ultimately correct any anticompetitive harm resulting from a merger...

This paper presents an analysis of the merger decisions between 1982-1992. The survey of cases suggests that the plaintiffs win roughly half the time. Plaintiffs were no more likely to win if a case...

This paper combines state-level data on trucking rates with information on state-level regulations to estimate the independent effect on rates from three different types of motor carrier regulations...

This analysis derives the optimal incentive contracts owners offer managers who engage in Stackelberg-quantity competition. In contrast to the Coumot case, the owner of the leading firm motivates his...

Recent literature has shown that when retailers cannot observe contracts between a manufacturer and their rivals, the manufacturer will be unable to obtain the vertically integrated profit using two...

Industrial organization issues that are relevant to antitrust have been studied in the laboratory for over three decades, and the results of this research offer useful insights for applied work in...

Analyses of general acute care hospital mergers have traditionally defined the relevant product market as inpatient medical and surgical acute care and have generally assumed that economies of scale...

This paper models the reaction of firms to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) decisions to seek to block proposed horizontal mergers. Finns' responses to the FTC are shown to depend on a number of factors...

The creation of a charge for long distance companies to access the local telephone companies' switched network created the incentive to bypass the local switched network in order to avoid access...

Previous work on consumer search has shown that consumers facing positive search costs do not sample more than one firm; that is, no search occurs in equilibrium. This result, as well as the price...

The Sherman Antitrust Act is over a century old, yet debate continues about its original goal. Previous authors, focusing on the substance of the 1890 debate, have reached various conclusions about...

This paper models procurement auctions when suppliers face increasing costs. It is shown than an asymmetric equilibrium exists whereby one bidder bids different prices on each project in a series of...

The survivor technique is used to examine economies of scale in the steel industry, and the results are compared to an earlier engineering approach study by Tarr. Specifically the paper focuses on the...

This paper develops more general conditions for identifying when a cost increase may be profitable for incumbent firms. Given those conditions, it then shows that advertising restrictions can act as...

Anecdotal evidence reveals that an import quota is not always filled when the quota is specified in terms of a market-share limit instead of a quantity limit. In a simple Cournot duopoly, we provide a...