Cell phone use is increasing worldwide, leading to a concern that cell phone use while driving increases accidents. Several countries, as well as two states and many municipalities in the U.S., have banned the use of hand-held cell phones while driving. In this paper, we develop a new approach...

Our study extends the empirical literature on whether vertical restraints are anticompetitive. We focus on exclusive contracting in platform markets, which feature indirect network effects and thus are susceptible to applications barriers to entry. Theory suggests that exclusive contracts in...

Mobile phone usage while driving is increasing throughout the world. In this paper, we use survey data from 7,268 U.S. drivers to estimate the relationship between mobile phone use while driving and accidents. We hypothesize that drivers who use mobile phones while driving may be more likely to...

We conduct a basic analysis of entry and exit in the US broadband market, using a complete FCC census of providers from 2005 to 2008. There is a tremendous amount of (simultaneous) entry and exit in the US broadband market. Most entry is from existing providers expanding into new geographic...

We examine citizen engagement in political and social civic life in California. We begin by comparing the state to the nation at large, and find that California lags the nation in non-electoral civic engagement. The data also show that Whites were more engaged than Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians,...

This appendices to this report can be found at: (https://ssrn.com/abstract=3435260). In regulating tobacco products, governments seek to promote public health by discouraging consumption. However, imposing regulatory costs and taxes on licit producers and consumers presents an economic...

As the tax base for traditional tobacco excise taxes continues to erode, policymakers have growing interest to expand taxation to novel and reduced-risk tobacco products. Chief among the latter are e-cigarettes although taxes for other reduced-risk tobacco products such as heated tobacco and...

This paper endogenizes the interplay between innovation by a regulated firm and regulatory delay. In the signaling model, the firm times its innovation to communicate its private information about the MC of delay to the regulator. When product innovation costs fall over time, an extra day of...

Cigarettes are highly taxed in Europe to discourage tobacco use and to fund public-health measures to mitigate the harms from tobacco consumption. At higher prices (more precisely, at higher differentials between licit and black-market prices) consumers substitute more toward illicit cigarettes....

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) spent $4.7B during 2009-2013 to, int. al, increase broadband adoption in underserved communities. We characterize the BTOP grants and examine the impact of the awards on broadband adoption....