The airline industry is the central part of the commercial aviation value and supply chain. Nevertheless, it has the lowest profit margin and return on investment compared to other sectors in the chain. This leads to the question whether the airline industry is sustainable in the long run, the...

Almost 20 years after passage of the US Airline Deregulation Act, air transport regulatory liberalization has made inroads on all continents. But even as deregulation is still spreading, there are also calls for some form of re-regulation. The reasons are diverse and not necessarily consistent....

There has been a perception that U.S. trunk airlines had an inherent cost advantage over smaller regional airlines because of economies of scale. We have formulated a general model of airline costs, which we estimate by using panel data on large and small airlines. Differences in scale are shown...

This paper discusses alternative concepts of productivity and methods of measurement. Different measures are appropriate for different questions. Partial factor productivity measures, such as the ever-popular labour productivity, are appropriate where disaggregate operational performance is of...

This paper compares the decisions of the European Commission on airline merger cases. The authors provide an overview of the merger decisions between 1996 and 2009 and analyze the definitions of the relevant market applied in each case. First, it considers the relevant market definition develop...

Recent years have seen a global trend towards the emergence of multi-airport companies operating at a global scale. This paper employs industrial and transaction costs economics to identify the main drivers that shape the patterns of international cross-ownership structures that have emerged in...

This paper explores the relevance of spatial effects on airport competition. Drawing concentric circles of travel distances around it is the most commonly way to define an airport’s catchment area. The characteristics of the catchment area and available substitutes are compared, and...

The paper examines the case of Alitalia, Italy’s former flag carrier, as a case of a state-managed failure. The history of the airline is characterized by a continuous decline in its competitive position since the progressive liberalization of the European aviation market. The root cause...