The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluate whether increased choice increased demand elasticity faced by hospitals...

Governments frequently intervene to support domestic industries, but a surprising amount of this support goes to ailing sectors. We explain this with a lobbying model that allows for entry and sunk costs. Specifically, policy is influenced by pressure groups that incur lobbying expenses to...

This paper explores the impact of trade on growth when firms are heterogeneous. We find that greater openness produces anti-and pro-growth effects. The Melitz-model selection effects raises the expected cost of introducing a new variety and this tends to slow the rate of new-variety introduction...

This paper shows that smoking intensity, i.e. the amount of nicotine extracted per cigarette smoked, responds to changes in excise taxes and tobacco prices. We exploit NHANES data covering the period 1988 to 2006 across many US states. Moreover, using panel data from the Coronary Artery Risk...

Formal analysis of the political economy of trade policy was substantially redirected by the appearance of Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman’s 1994 paper, “Protection for Sale”. Before that article a fairly wide range of approaches were favoured by various authors on various issues, but...

This paper tests for the importance of cash flow on investment in fixed capital and R&D using firm-level panel data in two countries between 1985 and 1994. For German firms, cash flow is not informative in simple econometric models of fixed investment or R&D. In identical specifications for...

Sales are a widespread and well-known phenomenon that has been documented in several product markets. Regularities in such periodic price reductions appear to suggest that the phenomenon cannot be entirely attributed to random variations in supply, demand, or the aggregate price level. Certain...

This paper compares the leader and follower payoff in a duopoly game, as they arise in sequential play, with the Nash payoff in simultaneous play. If the game is symmetric, has a unique symmetric Nash equilibrium, and players' payoffs are monotonic in the opponent's choice along their own best...

We provide an asymptotic distribution theory for a class of Generalized Method of Moments estimators that arise in the study of differentiated product markets when the number of observations is associated with the number of products within a given market. We allow for three sources of error: the...

The existence of a negative relationship between cartel stability and the level of excess capacity in an industry has for a long time been the dominant view in the traditional IO literature. Recent supergame-theoretic contributions (e.g. Brock and Scheinkman, 1985) appear to show that this view...