Following a brief review of the U.S. domestic airline industry under regulation (1938-1978), we study the changes that have occurred in pricing, service, and competition in the 28 years since deregulation. We then examine some of the major public policy issues facing the industry: (a) the...

This paper extends our earlier analysis of interdependent security issues to a general class of problems involving discrete interdependent risks with heterogeneous agents. There is a threat of an event that can only happen once, and the risk depends on actions taken by others. Any agent's...

The safety of the commercial airline industry has attracted considerable public attention and debate since economic deregulation of the industry in 1978. These concerns have energized economic research on three aspects of airline safety. First, has the level of airline safety declined since...

"We identify a new set of stylized facts on the 2008-2009 trade collapse that we hope can be used to shed light on the importance of demand and supply-side factors in explaining the fall in trade. In particular, we decompose the fall in international trade into product entry and exit, price...

This paper is a brief evaluation of the Eurosystem's monetary-policy regime after its first year, in particular of the extent to which it is similar to inflation targeting as practiced by an increasing number of central banks. I examine the Eurosystem's goals, framework for monetary-policy...

This paper applies a full-information technique to test for the presence of contagion across the money markets of ERM member countries. We show that whenever it is possible to estimate a model for interdependence, a test for contagion based on a full information technique is more powerful. We...

The premise of the paper is that the fervor for foreign exchange market intervention by U.S, and European monetary authorities has ebbed in recent years. A pattern of initial belief in the effectiveness of foreign exchange market intervention has recently been eroded, as is revealed by the...

A growing body of new research has emphasized the macroeconomic consequences of transactional impediments in factor markets, and their role in the recurrent restructuring requirements of modern economies. We first review the function institutional arrangements play in facilitating transactions...

We study the dynamics of price indices for major U.S. cities using panel econometric methods and find that relative price levels among cities mean revert at an exceptionally slow rate. In a panel of 19 cities from 1918 to 1995, we estimate the half-life of convergence to be approximately nine...

The creation of the euro and the European Central Bank is a remarkable and unprecedented event in economic and political history: creating a supranational central bank and leaving eleven countries without national currencies of their own. The experience of the first year confirms that one size...