Tag: Bureau of Economics

In their famous 1984 paper, Shapiro & Stiglitz developed what has become the canonical efficiency wage model. In their model, all workers are paid an efficiency wage, and no one shirks. Their model is...

This paper explores the relationship between competition and hospital charity care by analyzing changes in charity care associated with changes in a hospital’s competitive environment (due to mergers...

This paper explores a firm's incentive to technologically tie when R&D is important and finds that technological tying increases innovation, which is an efficiency not considered in other tying models...

I examine online and offline prices for popular disposable contact lenses. Idiosyncratic features of this market make it likely that offline firms set prices on the assumption that most of their...

The most popular methodology used by the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) from 1989 through 1994 to determine whether unfairly traded imports injure competing domestic industries was known...

I analyze the effect on consumer welfare of settlements of patent infringement lawsuits that consist of a royalty-free license for delayed entry by a potentially infringing horizontal competitor of...

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic equilibrium model of the market for commercial aircraft. Airline choices are modeled as the solution to a discrete time dynamic programming problem, where...

PUBLISHED AS: Who Are the Victims of Identity Theft? The Effect of Demographics This paper examines whether the likelihood that an individual will experience identity theft varies with the individual...

This working paper presents the findings of copy test research on consumer perceptions of food and dietary supplement print advertisements containing qualified health claims for diet-disease...

PUBLISHED AS: Do Gasoline Mergers Affect Consumers' Prices? The Marathon-Ashland and UDS Transaction Marathon-Ashland Petroleum’s (MAP) 1999 acquisition of the Michigan assets of Ultramar Diamond...

Economics at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) covers both the antitrust and consumer protection missions. In this year’'s essay, we focus mainly on the competition-side of the agency. Drawing on a...

It is widely believed that larger customers in a market can secure lower prices than smaller customers. This paper presents conditions under which risk averse sellers, who can distinguish larger...

In this paper, we examine price movements over time around the collapse of a bid-rigging conspiracy. While the mean decreased by sixteen percent, the standard deviation increased by over two hundred...

Individual Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cases invariably raise broad questions about consumers, markets, and effective enforcement policy. Recent consumer protection cases raise questions about...

This paper estimates a duration model of late stage drug development in the pharmaceutical industry using publicly available data. The paper presents descriptive results on the estimated relationship...

This report updates two earlier FTC studies on mergers and structural change in the U.S. petroleum industry. Reviewing industry developments since the 1980s, this report finds, among other things...

This survey will help the FTC better serve fraud victims through law enforcement and education. The survey was designed, in part, to assist that agency in determining whether information in the FTC’s...