The focus of this thesis is on issues of empirical industrial organization. Specifically, I utilize tools and ideas from Industrial organization to study areas of health and history. In Chapter 1, I examine the relationship between how hospital ownership is organized and the intensity of competition in the US health care market. I study the question using an empirical entry model. These models typically exhibit multiple equilibria. To resolve this problem, a novel algorithm that computes all the equilibria of the game is developed. My findings suggest that for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals can be regarded as supplying differentiated products. I also find evidence suggesting that markets that have both types of hospitals enjoy a higher level of health care services. Chapter 2 is coauthored with Eugene Choo. In this chapter, we investigate the variation of winning bids in slave auctions held in New Orleans from 1804 to 1862. Specifically, we measure the variation in the price of slaves conditional on their geographical origin. Previous work using a regression framework ignored the auction mechanism used to sell slaves. This introduces a bias in the conditional mean of the winning bid. Unfortunately, the number of bidders is unobserved by the econometrician. We adopt the standard framework of a symmetric independent private value auction and propose an estimation strategy to overcome this bias. We find the number of bidders had a significant positive effect on the average winning bid. The price variation according to the geographical origin of slaves found in earlier work continued to persist after accounting for the omitted variable. Chapter 3 is coauthored with Henry Overman, Diego Puga, and Matthew Turner. In this chapter, we study the relationship between urban sprawl and obesity. Using data that tracks individuals over time, we find no evidence that urban sprawl causes obesity. We show that previous findings of a positive relationship most likely reflect a failure to properly control for the fact the individuals who are more likely to be obese choose to live in more sprawling neighborhoods. Our results indicate that current interest in changing the built environment to counter the rise in obesity is misguided.
Empirical Studies in Industrial Organization brings together leading scholars who present state-of-the-art research in the spirit of the structure-conduct-performance paradigm embodied in the work of Leonard W. Weiss. The individual chapters are generally empirically or public policy oriented. A number of them introduce new sources of data that, combined with the application of appropriate econometric techniques, enable new breakthroughs and insights on issues hotly debated in the industrial organization literature. For example, five of the chapters are devoted towards uncovering the link between market concentration and pricing behavior. While theoretical models have produced ambiguous predictions concerning the relationship between concentration and price these chapters, which span a number of different markets and situations, provide unequivocal evidence that a high level of market concentration tends to result in a higher level of prices. Three of the chapters explore the impact of market structure on production efficiency, and three other chapters focus on the role of industrial organization on public policy. Contributors include David B. Audretsch, Richard E. Caves, Mark J. Roberts, F.M. Scherer, John J. Siegfried and Hideki Yamawaki.
My thesis applies recent empirical industrial organization tools to study policy and managerial questions arising in three important market settings: healthcare, digital platforms, and urban housing/transportation. The first chapter of the paper studies a vertical contract, ''resale price maintenance'' (RPM). RPM is controversial from an antitrust perspective because it can eliminate double markups but facilitate price coordination across retailers. I offer direct empirical evidence on these effects of RPM by combining an anti-trust case about RPM with a novel retailer-level dataset. I find that RPM is primarily used to reduce double markups while also facilitating price coordination in the retail sector. Motivated by these findings, I build and estimate a structural model and illustrate how the key model primitives (consumer substitution patterns and manufacturer bargaining power) determine the welfare to offer insights for regulators. The second chapter studies a prevalent dilemma on digital platforms: whether a platform should capitalize on popular content to satisfy viewers in the short run or support nascent content creators for better performance in the long run. I examine an internal experiment in a short-form video platform to quantify the effects of a support program on novice content creators. I find that the program leads to a worse viewer experience in the short run but leads to more content posting and higher content quality. The combined results suggest that improving content quality could counterbalance the adverse effects on viewer experience within three months. The last chapter builds an equilibrium sorting model of housing location and commuting mode choice with endogenous traffic congestion to evaluate the efficiency and equity impacts of a menu of urban transportation policies. Leveraging fine-scale data from household travel diaries and housing transaction data identifying residents' home and work locations in Beijing, we recover structural estimates with rich preference heterogeneity over both travel mode and residential location decisions. Overall, our results advocate for a congestion pricing policy coupled with subway construction.
Essays on Microeconomics and Industrial Organisation aim to serve as a source and work of reference and consultation for the field of Microeconomics in general and of Industrial Organisation in particular. Traditionally, Microeconomics is essentially taught as theory and hardly ever an estimation of a demand, production and cost function is offered . Over the last two decades, however, Microeconomics has greatly broadened its field of empirical application. Therefore, this text combines microeconomic theories with a variety of empirical cases. The standardised microeconomic analysis of demand, production and costs is set forth along with appropriate econometric techniques. The text consists of four parts: Demand, Production and Costs (Supply), Market and Industrial Structure and Failure of Market and Industrial Regulation. It includes eleven new chapters with respect to the first edition.
Conventional economic analysis of property rights in natural resources is too narrow and restrictive to allow for effective comparisons between alternative institutional structures. In this book, a conceptual framework is developed for the analysis of the
Written solely for the undergraduate audience, Industrial Organization: Theory and Practice, which features early coverage of Antitrust, punctuates its modern introduction to industrial organization with relevant empirical data and case studies to show students how to apply theoretical tools.
This dissertation has four chapters. The first three chapters examine health insurance markets in the U.S., focusing in particular on contexts where there are important interactions between health insurance plans. The fourth chapter is on the U.S. budget, examining the implications of annual budget cycles on the quantity and quality of end-of-year spending. Chapter 1, entitled "Bankruptcy as Implicit Health Insurance" examines the interaction between health insurance and the implicit insurance that people have because they can file (or threaten to file) for bankruptcy. With a simple model that captures key institutional features, I demonstrate that the financial risk from medical shocks is capped by the assets that could be seized in bankruptcy. For households with modest seizable assets, this implicit "bankruptcy insurance" can crowd out conventional health insurance. I test these predictions using variation in the state laws that specify the type and level of assets that can be seized in bankruptcy. Because of the differing laws, people who have the same assets and receive the same medical care face different losses in bankruptcy. Exploiting the variation in seizable assets that is orthogonal to wealth and other household characteristics, I show that households with fewer seizable assets are more likely to be uninsured. This finding is consistent with another: uninsured households with fewer seizable assets end up making lower out-of-pocket medical payments. The estimates suggest that if the laws of the least debtor-friendly state of Delaware were applied nationally, 16.3 percent of the uninsured would buy health insurance. Achieving the same increase in coverage would require a premium subsidy of approximately 44.0 percent. To shed light on puzzles in the literature and examine policy counterfactuals, I calibrate a utility-based, micro-simulation model of insurance choice. Among other things, simulations show that "bankruptcy insurance" explains the low take-up of high-deductible health insurance. Chapter 2, entitled "Pricing and Welfare in Health Plan Choice", is coauthored with M. Kate Bundorf and Jonathan Levin. The starting point for the paper is the simple observation that when insurance premiums do not reflect individual differences in expected costs, consumers may choose plans inefficiently. We study this problem in health insurance markets, a setting in which prices often do not incorporate observable differences in expected costs. We develop a simple model and estimate it using data on small employers. In this setting, the welfare loss compared to the feasible risk-rated benchmark is around 2-11% of coverage costs. Three-quarters of this is due to restrictions on risk-rating employee contributions; the rest is due to inefficient contribution choices. Despite the inefficiency, the benefits from plan choice relative to each of the single-plan options are substantial. Chapter 3, entitled "The Private Coverage and Public Costs: Identifying the Effect of Private Supplemental Insurance on Medicare Spending, " is coauthored with Marika Cabral. While most elderly Americans have health insurance coverage through Medicare, traditional Medicare policies leave individuals exposed to significant financial risk. Private supplemental insurance to "fill the gaps" of Medicare, known as Medigap, is very popular. In this Chapter, we estimate the impact of this supplemental insurance on total medical spending using an instrumental variables strategy that leverages discontinuities in Medigap premiums at state boundaries. Our estimates suggest that Medigap increases medical spending by 57 percent--or about 40 percent more than previous estimates. Back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that a 20 percent tax on premiums would generate combined revenue and savings of 6.2 percent of baseline costs; a Pigovian tax that fully accounts for the fiscal externality would yield savings of 18.1 percent. Chapter 4, entitled "Do Expiring Budgets Lead to Wasteful Year-End Spending? Evidence from Federal Procurement, " is coauthored with Jeffrey Liebman. Many organizations fund their spending out of a fixed budget that expires at year's end. Faced with uncertainty over future spending demands, these organizations have an incentive to build a buffer stock of funds over the front end of the budget cycle. When demand does not materialize, they then rush to spend these funds on lower quality projects at the end of the year. We test these predictions using data on procurement spending by the U.S. federal government. Using data on all federal contracts from 2004 through 2009, we document that spending spikes in all major federal agencies during the 52nd week of the year as the agencies rush to exhaust expiring budget authority. Spending in the last week of the year is 4.9 times higher than the rest-of-the-year weekly average. We examine the relative quality of year-end spending using a newly available dataset that tracks the quality of $130 billion in information technology (I.T.) projects made by federal agencies. Consistent with the model, average project quality falls at the end of the year. Quality scores in the last week of the year are 2.2 to 5.6 times more likely to be below the central value. To explore the impact of allowing agencies to roll unused spending over into subsequent fiscal years, we study the I.T. contracts of an agency with special authority to roll over unused funding. We show that there is only a small end-of-year I.T. spending spike in this agency and that the one major I.T. contract this agency issued in the 52nd week of the year has a quality rating that is well above average.
