Previous work has claimed that monopoly power facilitates the provision of credit, since monopolists are better able to enforce payment. Here, we argue that if relationship-specific investments are required by borrowers to establish creditworthiness, monopoly power may reduce credit provision...

This paper proposes a proximity-concentration tradeoff in product space as a determinant of horizontal foreign direct investment (FDI). Firms that enter a foreign market by exporting are able to capture consumer surplus from introducing a differentiated product with characteristics that the...

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...

This paper provides a framework to classify and evaluate the impact of net neutrality regulations on the allocation of consumer attention and the distribution of surplus between consumers, ISPs and content providers. While the model provided largely nests other contributions in the literature,...

We study how firms differ from their competitors using new time-varying measures of product differentiation based on text-based analysis of product descriptions from 50,673 firm 10-K statements filed yearly with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This year-by-year set of product...

The pricing of medical products and services in the U.S. is notoriously complex. In health care, supply prices (those received by the manufacturer) are distinct from demand prices (those paid by the patient) due to health insurance. The insurer, in designing the benefit, decides what prices...

As it becomes cheaper to copy and share digital content, vendors are turning to technical protections such as encryption. We argue that if protection is nevertheless imperfect, this transition will generally lower the prices of content relative to perfect legal enforcement. However, the effect...

Political competitiveness - which many interpret as the degree of democracy - can be modeled as a monopolistic competition. All regimes are constrained by the threat of "entry," and thereby seek some combination of popular support and political entry barriers. This simple model predicts that...

During the 1990s US healthcare markets underwent a significant transformation. Managed care rose to become the dominant form of insurance in the private sector. Also, a wave of hospital consolidation occurred. In 1990, the mean population-weighted hospital Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) in a...

This paper provides a new explanation for tying that is not based on any of the standard explanations -- efficiency, price discrimination, and exclusion. Our analysis shows how a monopolist sometimes has an incentive to tie a complementary good to its monopolized good in order to transfer...