This article examines the regulation of the air transport sector from the perspective of competition law, focusing specifically on European Union (EU)-U.S. air transport relations. Emphasis is placed on the ongoing negotiations between Europe and the United States for the creation of a...

The market developments in international air transportation have led to the dominance of three global airline alliances – Star, SkyTeam and oneworld. At the same time, members of these alliances receive increasingly more freedom in coordinating various aspects of joint operations, including...

The empirical assessment of market power using conduct parameter models has the weaknesses of lacking proper grounding in oligopoly theory and typically producing inconsistent supply-side estimates. This paper develops an alternative framework for evaluating market power with a freely estimated...

This paper explores, both theoretically and empirically, the impact of granting antitrust immunity (ATI) to airline alliances in a novel and realistic framework characterized by vertically-differentiated air services. Our theoretical model suggests that non-ATI alliances produce an up-market...

Unlike other industries, significant changes in the airline industry have not mainly occurred due to technological changes, but rather as a result of developments in the applicable legal framework and various institutional reforms. As a consequence of the deregulation wave which dates back to...

Empirical work shows that competition is important for promoting economic growth. However, in Japan the promotion of competition has long been compromised by ministerial guidance and exemptions from the competition law. Thus, the level and growth of productivity have been low in many...

We investigate the success of legislation aimed at increasing competition at highly concentrated major US airports, mainly by forcing these airports to increase the availability of scarce airport facilities to new entrants. We use a multi-dimensional regression-discontinuity approach to exploit...

This article provides evidence from the airline industry on the competitive effects of grants of antitrust immunity by regulatory agencies to certain joint venture agreements. In the airline industry, the U.S. Department of Transportation retains the statutory authority to approve and immunize...

This article takes stock of the regulatory convergence between US antitrust law and EU competition law in the field of international air transport. The analysis draws a distinction between domestic aviation and international aviation and sets the boundaries of regulatory convergence in...

This paper estimates the effects of code sharing, antitrust immunity and Open Skies treaties on prices, output and capacity using an eleven-year panel of U.S.-Europe data. Code sharing and immunized alliances are found to have significantly lower prices than traditional interline (multi-carrier)...