Tag: Bureau of Economics

We conduct a retrospective study of the Sutter-Summit hospital merger to assess whether antitrust enforcement in this matter was appropriate. This consummated merger combined two hospitals located...

Economics at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) supports both the competition and consumer protection missions of the agency. In this year’s essay we discuss competition activity with a summary of our...

We estimate the effect of education and student status on the propensity to smoke. Our estimation strategy accounts for the endogeneity of education by “differencing out” the impact of unobserved...

This study reports the results of the Federal Trade Commission’s second statistical survey of fraud in the United States. The survey found that 30.2 million adults – 13.5 percent of the adult...

Economics at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) supports both the competition and consumer protection missions of the agency. In this year’'s essay we discuss two issues, one from each of the agency’...

In a paper in the March 2004 AER, Justine Hastings concludes that the acquisition of an independent gasoline retailer, Thrifty, by a vertically integrated firm, ARCO, is associated with sizable price...

This study examines the effect of credit-based insurance scores on the price and availability of automobile insurance and the impact of such scores on racial and ethnic minority groups and on low...

While retail sales are an important economic phenomenon, previous research has not explored how the multiproduct nature of consumers’ purchasing decisions affects the pricing dynamics of multiproduct...

This study presents the results of 36 in-depth interviews with recent mortgage customers, and quantitative consumer testing with over 800 mortgage customers, that examined how consumers search for...

This study provides a comprehensive assessment of the amount and type of television advertising seen by children in 2004 and compares these results to similar studies conducted for the Federal Trade...

PUBLISHED AS: New Market Policy Effects on Used Markets: Theory and Evidence Investment tax credits are generally implemented to stimulate investment in new goods. However, in the case of durable...

We examine retail gasoline station pricing using three years of weekly prices for 272 stations in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. We report a number of new empirical findings about station...

This working paper presents the findings of copy test research on consumer perceptions of heart-health claims in print advertisements for a fictitious cooking oil low in saturated fat, and a vegetable...

Aggregate demand models typically assume that consumers choose between all available products. Since consumers may be unwilling to search across every store in a given market for a particular item...

Economics at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) supports both the competition and consumer protection missions of the agency. In this year'’s essay we discuss a range of activities focusing on data...