In March 1997, the Supreme Court upheld the must-carry provisions of the 1992 Cable Act on the grounds that they insured the survival of the “free” over-the-air television. This article empirically evaluates the efficacy of must-carry in preserving free television and shows that non-network...

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 reduced restrictions oin the cable TV industry, providing completely deregulated rates in March 1999. In this paper, we develop a simple tradeoff between price and quality in order to calculate the welfare tradeoff to consumers of the provision of one...

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, we warn analysts against the use of structural coeffcient estimates alone for deducing quantitative inferences concerning many policy experiments. Second, we offer a potential solution to the problem by proposing a mutatis mutandis approach to...

In this paper, we offer a hybrid approach to merger simulation in which we allow rather extensive pre-testing to suggest the ‘correct', or most desirable, form for the underlying demand curves. Our application is the merger between the large mobile telephone companies Cingular and AT&T...

In this paper, we disprove claims by proponents of increased Internet regulation that Broadband Service Providers (“BSPs”) - such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint-Nextel, Qwest, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable - make “record profits,” “substantial profits,” and “soaring profits.” By...

The United States has recently reinvigorated its efforts to promote ubiquitous broadband at affordable prices for all Americans by both committing over $7.2 billion in stimulus funds and by requiring the Federal Communications Commission to issue a “National Broadband Plan.” The big policy...

Communications Commission (“FCC”) in its CALLS Order in 2000, which reduced usage based access rates and raised caps on the Subscriber Line Charge (“SLC”), a fixed, monthly fee paid by local phone company subscribers for basic connections. At present, the Commission is evaluating...

We explore the question of whether wireless industry mergers invariably reduce sector employment and find the answer is "no." We reach this conclusion by looking at four years of data on employment trends surrounding the largest wireless merger to date - the AT&T-Cingular merger in 2004, and two...