I study delays and congestion patterns in U.S. hub airports during periods of high flight volume. I find that these periods are longer when the share of flights operated by the hub airline is greater, and these longer periods exhibit shorter delays. These results lend support to recent...

The Hub-and-Spoke network is a defining feature of the airline industry. This paper is among the first in the literature to introduce an empirical framework for analyzing network competition among airlines. Airlines make market entry decisions and choose flight frequencies in the first stage,...

American, Delta, and United have organized their operations into extensive hub-and-spoke networks that typically require passengers originating and concluding travel in non-hub cities to board a connecting flight at a hub en route to the final destination. From the passenger perspective,...

The objective of this study is to provide evidence on the accuracy of merger simulation methods, which have become common instruments to evaluate ex-ante the effects of complex transactions. In particular, I study the price effects of one of the most important mergers in the U.S. airline...

We exploit the abundance of tax changes in the airline industry after the DOT's full-disclosure rule. We determine the "effective" tax rate and analyze how passengers reacted to the tax changes. Hausman-type instruments are used to address the problems arising from endogenously determined...

This paper assesses the impact of the September 11th terrorist attacks and its after-effects on U.S. airline demand. Using monthly time-series data from 1986-2003, we find that September 11th resulted in both a negative transitory shock of over 30% and an ongoing negative demand shock amounting...

We investigate the competitive effects of the merger between Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines (2009) in the domestic U.S. airline industry. Applying fixed effects regression models we find that the transaction led to short term price increases of about 11 percent on overlapping routes and...

I document the evolution of market power in the U.S. airline industry for the period 1990:Q1-2019:Q4. I recover estimates of markups, defined as the ratio of price to marginal cost, at the airline-time level. Dominant carriers in the industry have substantially increased their markups in the...

The paper investigates the construction of a low cost airline network by analyzing JetBlue Airways' entry decisions into nonstop domestic U.S. airport-pair markets between 2000 and 2009. Adopting duration models with time-varying covariates, we find that JetBlue consistently avoided concentrated...