The Communications Act requires the Federal Communications Commission to assess whether proposed spectrum license transactions serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity. We review the FCC’s implementation of this component of the Act. We provide a tractable economic model of...

This article reviews several issues confronted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over the past year and discusses some of the economic analysis employed by the FCC in examining these issues. The article also identifies areas in which future academic research would be valuable to the...

In its attempts to deter and prosecute big rigging, U.S. antitrust authorities have focused on sealed-bid procurements, rather than on ascending-bid auctions. One possible justification for this focus is the idea, supported by the existing theoretical literature, that collusion creates...

Carbon allowance auctions are a component of existing and proposed regional cap-and-trade programs in the U.S. and are also included in recent bills in the U.S. Congress that would establish a national cap-and-trade program in the U.S. to regulate greenhouse gases (“carbon”). We discuss and...

We study the role of whistleblowing in the following inspection game. Two agents who compete for a prize can either behave legally or illegally. After the competition, a controller investigates the agents’ behavior. This inspection game has a unique (Bayesian) equilibrium in mixed strategies....

The equity markets for smaller issues are characterized by close economic relationships between new issuers and the underwriters who bring the stock public. Underwriters sponsor new issues and often provide liquidity in the secondary market by acting as market makers. This paper analyzes...

We examine choices of leverage and debt maturity, focusing on the impact of investment opportunity sets and regulatory environments. Using the mathematics of strategic complementarities, we derive conditions under which firms choose facets of capital structure that re monotonic in their...

We study the effects of changes in bid-ask spreads on the prices and trading volumes of stocks that move from Nasdaq to the NYSE or Amex, and stocks move from Amex to Nasdaq. When stocks move from Nasdaq to an exchange, their spreads typically decrease, but the reduction in spreads is much...