I discuss the antitrust suit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against Visa and MasterCard in 1998. Banks that issue Visa cards are free to also issue MasterCard cards, and vice versa, and many banks issue the cards of both networks. However, both Visa and MasterCard had rules...

We test whether firms use incompatibility strategically, using data from ATM markets. High ATM fees degrade the value of competitors' deposit accounts, and can in principle serve as a mechanism for siphoning depositors away from competitors or for creating deposit account differentiation. Our...

Since the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act (1897) and the Sherman Act (1890), regulation and antitrust have operated as competing mechanisms to control competition. Regulation produced cross-subsidies and favors to special interests, but specified prices and rules of mandatory dealing....

We develop a model in which firms set impersonal salary levels before matching with workers. Salaries fall relative to any competitive equilibrium while profits rise by almost as much, implying little inefficiency. Furthermore, the best firms gain the most from the system while wages become...

The 2010 Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission Horizontal Merger Guidelines lay out a new standard for assessing proposed mergers in markets with differentiated products. This new standard is based on a measure of ``upward pricing pressure,'' (UPP) and the calculation of a ``gross...

Governments rescue private companies partly to prevent other firms from gaining excessive market power. However, if failing firms exit, new entry may limit remaining firms' market power if there are potential entrants who can be as effective competitors as the firms leaving the market. We...

This paper develops a framework for estimating preferences in two-sided matching markets with non-transferable utility using only data on observed matches. Unlike single-agent choices, matches depend on the preferences of other agents in the market. I use pairwise stability together with a...

Employment at multinational enterprises (MNEs) responds to wages at the extensive margin, when an MNE enters a foreign location, and at the intensive margin, when an MNE operates existing affiliates. We present an MNE model and conditions for parametric and nonparametric identification. Prior...

We develop and estimate a unified model of house prices, loan-to-value ratios (LTVs), and trade and foreclosure behavior. House prices are only observed for traded properties, and trades are endogenous, creating sample-selection problems for traditional estimators. We develop a Bayesian...

This paper studies capital adjustment at the establishment level. Our goal is to characterize capital adjustment costs, which are important for understanding both the dynamics of aggregate investment and the impact of various policies on capital accu- mulation. Our estimation strategy searches...