This paper evaluates the recent literature claiming that the US economy has generally become less competitive causing the US economy to perform poorly and that lax antitrust policy is one important reason for the decline in economic performance. Although there certainly are empirical facts...

Using the overcharge estimates for 406 cartel episodes, I evaluate the impact of cartel characteristics and market environment on the size of the overcharges imposed by cartels in different geographic markets and during six antitrust law regimes starting from the 18th century. I find that the...

Using the data on 238 cartelized markets we evaluate econometrically the impact of cartel characteristics as well the market and legal environment of cartel operation on cartel stability. The latter is measured as the expected number of repeated attempts to form a cartel in the same product...

This essay, written three years before the enactment of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, is a reminder of how little has been accomplished in deregulating telecommunications. In 1993, I erroneously predicted that American telecommunications regulation was about to collapse like the walls of...

In this review of John Lott's book, Are Predatory Commitments Credible?: Who Should the Courts Believe?, we find that Lott is more successful in pointing out the likelihood of predatory pricing by public enterprises than in proving that predatory pricing by private enterprises does not occur. In...

Through the end of the twentieth century, the most critical regulatory issue facing electric utilities was stranded costs, which can be defined as those costs that the utilities were permitted to recover through their rates but whose recovery may have been impeded or prevented by the advent of...

In this paper, we present a straightforward economic model that explains the incentives to manipulate nodal energy prices in a “Day 2” RTO market. The model distinguishes between legitimate market participation that increases overall market efficiency and manipulative behavior that distorts...

In this paper we especially focus on the issue of incentives to invest in relation to forced sharing of essential facilities and infrastructure in developing markets, where innovation plays a key role. We evaluate the economic consequences of third party access to the obliged to grant access...

United States v. Terminal Railroad Association, the essential facilities doctrine has been applied to a wide variety of business contexts - from football stadiums to the New York Stock Exchange. However, courts have also declined to extend the doctrine to a wide variety of situations. Despite...

Market manipulation is a poorly understood phenomenon, due in part to legal standards that categorize manipulative behavior as either an act of outright fraud or as the nebulous use of market power to produce an artificial price. In this paper, we consider a third type of behavior that can...