Many scholars argue that advertiser influence prevents commercial news media from reporting truthfully on harmful business practices. Yet overt evidence of advertiser influence on the news can be elusive, partly because fear of offending advertisers may lead news organizations to censor...

We analyze the welfare gains from the reform of existing government-induced distortions. Our results provide support for policies aimed at eliminating monopoly and other types of economic distortion. Welfare gains over the status quo exist whenever deregulation occurs. The threat of deregulation...

Studies of traffic safety typically assume that policies are adopted to further the public interest, thereby ignoring the political motives for policy. Since political motives can influence the design or enforcement of policies, accounting for political motives has relevance for evaluating...

We analyze the efficiency gains from deregulating monopolies using an equilibrium rent seeking model. McCormick, Shughart and Tollison (1984) argue that the initial effort to establish regulation dissipates the monopoly profit, limiting the gain from deregulation to the efficiency cost of...

Over 60 million registered motor vehicles in 20 states are subject to mandatory periodic safety inspection. The effect of safety inspection on roadway casualties has been estimated by several studies, with mixed results. We present a unique test of inspection effectiveness by analyzing the...

We examined the effectiveness of state automobile safety inspections and present new evidence from a panel of the 50 states for the years 1981–1993. Our approach incorporated several innovations over previous studies of safety inspections; most significantly, we estimated a fixed-effects model...

Settlement and trial expenditures are crucially interrelated. The literature on settlement, however, takes no account of models of trial. In this paper, we develop a unified model of settlement and trial expenditures. We do this by discarding the usual assumption of settlement models that trial...

In recent decades local governments have allocated billions of dollars to subsidizing construction of facilities for major league baseball. We use panel data that cover all major league baseball teams from 1989–2001 to estimate the impact of ballpark construction on team revenue. Our estimates...