"The 2013 merger of American Airlines and US Airways marked a major step in the consolidation of the U.S. airline industry. A young management team that began plotting mergers a decade earlier designed a strategy to seize an industry prize and it enlisted the help of unions who engineered one of...

We examine how financial crises redistribute risk, employing novel empirical methods and micro data from the largest financial crisis of the 20th century – the Great Depression. Using balance-sheet and systemic risk measures at the bank level, we build an econometric model with incidental...