We analyze the accuracy of first order approximation, a method developed theoretically in Jaffe and Weyl (2012) for predicting the price effects of mergers, and provide an empirical application. Approximation is an alternative to the model-based simulations commonly employed in industrial...

We analyze the effect of four US airline mergers using three retrospective techniques: standard difference-in-differences regression, synthetic control, and nearest neighbor matching. In doing so, we compare the performance of the most recently developed merger-retrospective methodologies. Each...