This paper seeks to understand the impact of the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexi- bility (Flex) Program on rural resident hospital choice and welfare. The Flex program created a new class of hospital, the Critical Access Hospital (CAH), which receives more generous reimbursement in return for...

We estimate a bargaining model of competition between hospitals and managed care organizations (MCOs) and use the estimates to evaluate the effects of hospital mergers. We find that MCO bargaining restrains hospital prices significantly. The model demonstrates the potential impact of coinsurance...

We seek to estimate the causes and magnitudes of network externalitiesfor the automated clearinghouse (ACH) electronic payments system, usinga panel data set on individual bank usage of ACH. We construct anequilibrium model of consumer and bank adoption of ACH in the presenceof a network. The...

We estimate a structural model of the market for automatic tellermachines (ATMs) in order to evaluate the implications of regulating ATMsurcharges on ATM entry and consumer and producer surplus. We estimatethe model using data on firm and consumer locations, and identify theparameters of the...