We examine the relationship between product liability litigation and innovation by systematically combining data on product liability lawsuits with data on new product introductions in a panel dataset of leading medical device firms. We first document a decline in the propensity to introduce new...

By April 2013, the FCC's recent bill-shock agreement with cellular carriers requires consumers be notified when exceeding usage allowances. Will the agreement help or hurt consumers? To answer this question, we estimate a model of consumer plan choice, usage, and learning using a panel of...

Stock exchange operators compete for order flow by setting "make" fees for limit orders and "take" fees for market orders. When traders quote continuous prices, they can choose prices that perfectly neutralize any fee division, and traders stream to the exchange with the lowest total fee. The...

Publishers produce books in hardcover and paperback versions with different prices and time of market introduction. Analysis of detailed book-level data reveals that (i) price-cost differentials cannot be explained by cost differences, making this an example of quality discrimination; (ii)...

Publishers produce books in hardcover and paperback versions with different prices and time of market introduction. Analysis of detailed book-level data reveals that (i) market introduction time has a strong effect on sales, suggesting that time is the crucial dimension of discrimination; (ii)...

Specialty hospitals tend to negotiate higher commercial insurance payments, even for relatively routine procedures with comparable clinical quality across hospital types. How specialty hospitals can maintain such a price premium remains an open question. In this paper, we examine a potential...

Under what conditions does cost-of-service regulation lead firms to distort costs? This paper analyzes changes in fuel procurement practices by coal- and natural gas-fired electricity generating plants in the United States following state-level legislation that ended cost-of-service regulation...

In many markets insurers are barred from price discrimination based on con- sumer characteristics like age, gender, and medical history. In this paper, I build on a recent literature to show why such policies are inefficient if consumers differ in their willingness-to-pay for insurance...

Regulatory reform efforts in a broad range of industries have resulted in increased importance of competitive forces as a means to allocate resources and improve economic efficiency. A number of indicators suggest that such forces have been stronger in the United States than in most other OECD...

Should managers be liable for ill-conceived business decisions? One answer is given by U.S. courts, which almost never hold managers liable for their mistakes. In this paper, we address the question in a theoretical model of delegated decision making. We find that courts should indeed be lenient...