This paper addresses the impact on investment incentives of the network sharing arrangements mandated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, with a focus on the implications of irreversible investment. Although the goal is to promote competition, the sharing rules now in place reduce incentives...

This paper evaluates the importance of property rights institutions', which protect citizens against expropriation by the government and powerful elites, and contracting institutions', which enable private contracts between citizens. We exploit exogenous variation in both types of institutions...

This paper formulates a multiproduct structural model to examine the evolution of the structure of production and demand and the dynamic interaction between the two in the context of the U.S. telecommunications industry over an extended period, from 1935 to 1987. We estimate the degree of scale...

In 1997, France Tsbquo;lsbquo;com, the state-owned French telephone company, went through a partial privatization. The government offered current and prior France Tsbquo;lsbquo;com employees the opportunity to buy portfolios of shares with various combinations of discounts, required holding...

This paper develops and simulates a dynamic model of strategic telecom competition. The goal is to understand how regulatory policy, particularly relative to lease charges for local network elements, affects telecom competition, investment, retail prices, and consumer welfare. The model assumes...

Telecommunications regulation in the U.S. is replete with a system of subsidies and taxes. Because of budgetary spending limits, Congress is unable to increase general taxes to pay for social programs and thus funds these programs from taxes on specific sectors of the economy. In this paper I...

We study the trade-offs faced by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that serve as platforms through which consumers access both television and internet services. As online streaming video improves, these providers may respond by attempting to steer consumers away from streaming video toward their...

This paper examines the economic environments in which past U.S. stock market booms occurred as a first step toward understanding how asset price booms come about and whether monetary policy should be used to defuse booms. We identify several episodes of sustained rapid rise in equity prices in...

During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic change in IPO activity around the world. Though vibrant IPO activity, attributed to better institutions and governance, used to be a strength of the U.S., it no longer is. IPO activity in the U.S. has fallen compared to the rest of the world...

U.S. corporations owe taxes to the U.S. Treasury on income earned both inside and outside American borders. This paper examines the incentives created by the U.S. tax system for the legal avoidance of taxes on foreign source income. Using data from 1986 corporate tax returns, we investigate the...