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...

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 identifies problems with the ordered breakup of Microsoft that seem to have been completely overlooked by the government, the judge, and the commentators. The breakup order prohibits Bill Gates and other large Microsoft shareholders from owning shares in both of the companies that...

We investigate a sample of firms whose number of reported segments falls by one or more for the first time in their reporting history. The firms in our sample have a significantly larger diversification discount, underperform, and underinvest relative to comparable firms. Firms are more likely...

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 develops a model incorporating costly disinvestment and estimates the associated commitment premium required to invest in telecommunications. Results indicate that the irreversibility premium raises the opportunity cost of capital by 70 percent. This implies an average annual hurdle...

Stock-market crashes tend to follow run-ups in prices. These episodes look like bubbles that gradually inflate and then suddenly burst. We show that such bubbles can form in a Zeira-Rob type of model in which demand size is uncertain. Two conditions are sufficient for this to happen: A declining...

This paper documents and assesses the significance of the policy changes in China that WTO accession implies in 3 key service categories (banking, insurance, and telecoms), asking whether it is likely they will really be fully implemented in their entirety as undertaken at signature in 2002....

The authors examine the role of differentiation strategies for entry behavior in markets for local telecommunication services in the late 1990s. Whereas the prior literature has used models of interaction among homogenous firms, this research is motivated by the claim of entrants that they...