A key issue in the talks on the fourth Lomé Convention is the demand of some Caribbean and Central American nations to join the ACP group, so as to benefit from the preferential treatment and financing facilities it enjoys. A specific concern is accession to the Sugar Protocol appended to the...

Almost universally, the Oaxaca (1973) decomposition is used to compare the outcomes between two discrete groups, e.g., black and white or male and female. In many applications, however, groups are not readily divided into discrete bins. The purpose of this paper is to extend the Oaxaca...

In 1989, Barry Harris & Joseph Simons developed a quantitative method to implement the Horizontal Merger Guidelines' hypothetical monopolist test with a market-level “critical loss” analysis. The appeal of Harris & Simons' framework is that it created a simple, intuitive approach to...

Issues of spatial competition play a key role in many antitrust matters in terms of both defining relevant markets and evaluating competitive effects. One area where this is particularly important is in retail competition. While detailed data for conducting empirical analyses is available in...

The staff at an antitrust agency can focus on either coordinated interaction (collusion) or unilateral effects theories when investigating a proposed merger. This paper statistically models whether the choice of economic theory materially affects the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) enforcement...

More than ten years after the European merger policy reform, sufficient data has been accumulated to explore the impact of the reform on the difference between the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) merger policy. We expect policies to converge following the EU 2004 reform that...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to AIDS-based demand systems (i.e., those based on Deaton and Muellbauer's Almost Ideal Demand System). We discuss derivation of the AIDS model from its microeconomic foundations, clearly state the assumptions underlying AIDS, and provide a...

This paper provides a guide to understanding physician claims data. Physician claims data reflect the prices and quantity of procedures provided by physicians and billed to insurers. These data are often used by policy analysts, legal professionals, and academics to analyze price dynamics in...

As a threshold matter, high market shares are considered informative of potential underlying competitive dynamics, especially issues of market power and dominance. However, as is well known, high shares may not tell the entire story. Beyond issues related to market definition, entry, and...