Airport benchmarking has become a popular tool used by economists and airport managers alike. Within academic circles, a number of studies emerged assessing the productivity and efficiency of airports. This paper surveys the methods, data, and findings of empirical research in order to learn...

The combined impact of ownership form, economic regulation and competition on airport performance is analyzed using data envelopment analysis to measure cost efficiency in the first stage and regression analysis to measure the impact of the environment in the second stage. The empirical results...

Benchmarking airports is currently popular both in the academic literature and in practice but has proved rather problematic due to the heterogeneity inherent in any reasonably sized dataset. Most studies either treat the airport production technology as a black box, or separate the terminal and...

Expanding airports is a topic which can easily make it to the first page of the national press. But this is highly unlikely as “bad news” is “good news” and most often failures and scandals make it to the front page. Berlin airport or the on-going failure to open up a nearly-complete new...

The heated debate on the regulatory framework for airports has highlighted the importance of creating good institutions for air transport in general. This paper defines the concept of effective regulatory institutions for air transport. It also describes the value chain for air transport and how...

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...