When will a monopolist have incentives to foreclose a complementary market by degrading compatibility/interoperability of his products with those of rivals? We develop a framework where leveraging extracts more rents from the monopoly market by "restoring" second degree price discrimination. In...

This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...

We analyze tacit collusion in an industry characterized by cyclical demand and long-run scale decisions; firms face deterministic demand cycles and choose capacity levels prior to competing in prices. Our focus is on the nature of prices. We find that two types of price wars may exist. In one,...

This paper deals with the effect of trade restrictions on competition in oligopolistic markets. Quantitative restrictions, such as VER's (Voluntary Export Restrictions) are shown to affect the extent to which foreign firms can compete in the domestic market, and hence to raise the equilibrium...

Developing countries spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on schools, educational materials and teachers, but relatively little is known about how effective these expenditures are at increasing students' years of completed schooling and, more importantly, the skills that they learn...

This paper uses a natural experiment in Israel to assess the impact of school teaching resources and how it is used, ‘time-on-task', on academic achievements and non-cognitive outcomes. It exploits variation induced by a change in the funding formula that reduced instructional resources...

The federal tax deduction for tuition potentially increases investments in postsecondary education at minimal administrative cost. We assess whether it actually does this using regression discontinuity methods on the income cutoffs that govern eligibility for the deduction. Although many...

Governments have used vouchers to spend billions of dollars on private education; much of this spending has gone to religiously-affiliated schools. We explore the possibility that vouchers could create a financial windfall for religious organizations operating private schools and in doing so...

The Federal government has spent billions of dollars to support turnarounds of low-achieving schools, yet most evidence on the impact of such turnarounds comes from high-profile, exceptional settings and not from examples driven by state policy decisions at scale. In this paper, we study the...

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act compelled states to design school-accountability systems based on annual student assessments. The effect of this Federal legislation on the distribution of student achievement is a highly controversial but centrally important question. This study presents...