Command and Control
Hideki Fukui & Koki Nagata
Economics of Transportation, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine the effects of the US DOT׳s tarmac delay rule (effective April 29, 2010) on flight cancellations and gate departure delays, using carrier-level panel data for the period between May 2008 and April 2012. Our results suggest the DOT׳s investigations of tarmac delay incidents triggered risk-averse behavior by investigated carriers, which increased flight cancellations and gate departure delays to avoid violating the rule. Carriers׳ preemptive flight cancellations are estimated to have affected about 308,900 passengers in 2011 alone. The results also suggest that these side effects persist for at least two years after the investigations, having larger adverse effects on passengers booked on the highest and lowest frequency routes. The costs and benefits of the rule need reevaluation.
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A fine is a more effective financial deterrent when framed retributively and extracted publicly
Tim Kurz, William Thomas & Miguel Fonseca
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Introducing monetary fines to decrease an undesired behavior can sometimes have the counterintuitive effect of increasing the prevalence of the behavior being targeted. Such findings raise important social psychological questions in relation to both the way in which financial penalties are framed and the social contexts in which they are administered. In a field experiment (Study 1), we informed participants who had signed up for an experiment that they would be fined if they arrived late. This fine was presented as either compensatory or retributive in nature and as being administered either privately or publicly. We then observed participants’ subsequent arrival time. In accordance with our hypotheses, participants’ punctuality was only improved (relative to a no-fine control) in response to retributive rather than compensatory fines and when told that fines would be administered publicly rather than privately. In Study 2 we used a scenario method to demonstrate that the greater efficacy of retributively framed fines can be attributed to their presence being less likely to undermine the perceived immorality of transgression than is the case for compensatory fines. We propose a material promotion-moral prevention (MPMP) theory to account for our findings and consider its practical implications for the use of financial disincentives to encourage cooperative behavior through public policy in domains such as climate change.
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Coasean Keep-Away: Voluntary Transaction Costs
Jordan Barry, John William Hatfield & Scott Duke Kominers
Harvard Working Paper, March 2014
Abstract:
The Coase Theorem predicts that, if there are no transaction costs, parties will always contract their way to an efficient outcome. Thus, no matter which legal rules society chooses, "Coasean bargains" will lead to efficient results. There are always some transaction costs. However, transaction costs are often thought to be low when there are no structural impediments to negotiation, such as large numbers of parties or barriers to communication. When these obstacles are not present, it is commonly assumed that the parties will achieve an efficient result through Coasean bargaining. We show that this assumption is incorrect. In particular, we demonstrate that transaction costs can be high, even when there are no structural impediments to bargaining, because the parties themselves may intentionally create transaction costs. Intuitively, an individual may prefer the Coasean bargain that is struck when certain parties are excluded from negotiations. Accordingly, that individual will wish to create transaction costs that keep those parties — potentially including herself — away from the negotiating table. We show that there are many contexts in which the parties will choose to create these "voluntary transaction costs," including environmental litigation, multilateral treaty negotiations, and creditor-debtor relationships. Because of the prevalence of voluntary transaction costs, Coasean logic applies to a significantly smaller class of cases than has previously been recognized. This renders law very important: Legal rules provide the starting point for the parties' negotiation; we find that when the parties’ starting point is closer to the efficient result, they are more likely to achieve an efficient outcome through Coasean bargaining. This insight favors reasonable use rules and other legal rules that attempt to assign entitlements in an efficient manner. We also find that liability remedies are more likely to encourage efficient outcomes than injunctive remedies are.
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Do U.S. Regulators Listen to the Public?: Testing the Regulatory Process with the RegRank Algorithm
Andrei Kirilenko, Shawn Mankad & George Michailidis
University of Maryland Working Paper, January 2014
Abstract:
According to the U.S. Constitution, the government cannot harm a single individual without "the due process of the law.'' Things are different, however, if a government action affects multiple individuals. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government can issue a regulation that can greatly harm many businesses and individuals "without giving them a chance to be heard.'' A federal statute called the Administrative Procedure Act mandates that federal regulatory agencies give the public a chance to comment on proposed regulations before they become final. We propose a new analytical tool called RegRank that can be used to measure and test whether government regulatory agencies actually adjust final rules in response to comments received from the public. We use RegRank to analyze the text of public rulemaking documents of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) - a federal regulatory agency in charge of implementing parts of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. We then test whether the regulatory agency adjusts final rules in the direction of sentiment expressed in public comments. We find strong evidence that it does.
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The Impacts of an Antitrust Investigation: A Case Study in Agriculture
Kalyn Coatney & Jesse Tack
Review of Industrial Organization, June 2014, Pages 423-441
Abstract:
We analyze the impacts of an antitrust investigation on the purchasing practices of a buying collaboration and its common bidding agent. Using a repeated cross section of prices across procurement auctions that were and were not subjected to the investigation, we find that auction prices in the targeted auctions: (i) significantly increased as soon as the targets were made aware they were under investigation; (ii) remained higher as long as the investigation was open; and (iii) systematically declined to the same low pre-knowledge state after the closure of the investigation without prosecution. Finally, the counterfactual impact on auction prices by the removal of the common bidding agent and the demise of the buying collaboration at a later date was on par with the impacts of the investigation.
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Market Power, Efficiencies, and Entry Evidence from an Airline Merger
Kai Hüschelrath & Kathrin Müller
Managerial and Decision Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the competitive effects of the merger between Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines (2009) in the domestic US airline industry. Applying fixed-effects regression models, we find that the transaction led to short-term price increases of about 11% on overlapping routes and about 10% on routes that experienced a merger-induced switch of the operating carrier. Over a longer period, however, our estimation results are consistent with the hypothesis that both merger efficiencies and postmerger entry by competitors initiated a downward trend in price, leaving consumers with a small net price increase of about 3% on the affected routes.
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Toward an efficiency rationale for the public provision of private goods
Hanming Fang & Peter Norman
Economic Theory, June 2014, Pages 375-408
Abstract:
Public provision of a private goods is justified on efficiency grounds in a model with no redistributive preferences. A government’s involvement in the provision of a private good generates information about preferences that facilitates more efficient revenue extraction for the provision of public goods. Public provision of the private good improves economic efficiency under a condition that is always fulfilled under independence and satisfied for an open set of joint distributions. The efficiency gains require that consumers cannot arbitrage the publicly provided private good, so our analysis applies to private goods where it is easy to keep track of the ultimate user, such as schooling and health care, but not to easily tradable consumer goods.
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Pro-competitive effect, division of labor, and firm productivity
Keita Kamei
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study constructs a general oligopolistic equilibrium model in which Smith’s (1776) famous theory of the division of labor under vertical specialization is embedded. We demonstrate that a pro-competitive government policy weakens the division of labor and hence reduces firm productivity, total output, and aggregate welfare. In addition, the policy promotes an increase in workers’ welfare and a decrease in firm owners’ welfare.
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Toby Huskinson & Robert Lawson
Applied Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article uses K-means clustering to group countries using the information from the five areas of the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index. The resulting clusters of countries are similar but not identical to quartile groupings found using the overall EFW index. Simple comparisons of socio-economic outcomes along the one-dimensional EFW index yield different results compared with the multidimensional-based country clusters. In particular, social democratic market economies appear to outperform liberal market economies using these simple comparisons.
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Adam Fremeth & Myles Shaver
Strategic Management Journal, May 2014, Pages 629–651
Abstract:
It is well documented that firms respond to regulations in their home jurisdictions. We present hypotheses that firms also respond to regulations in jurisdictions where they do not operate. We examine renewable-power provision in the U.S. electric utility sector between 2001 and 2006, and find that firms adopt more renewable-power generation when their peers (i.e., firms in the same regulatory jurisdiction) face greater renewable-power standards in other jurisdictions. The underlying mechanism is that forward-looking firms assess when extrajurisdictional regulations foreshadow regulatory changes where they operate. Our analyses support this mechanism versus plausible alternatives. We demonstrate firms acting strategically to respond to extrajurisdictional regulations and show that the central conduit motivating this response is the extrajurisdictional footprint of firms operating in the same jurisdiction as a focal firm.
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Jonathan Lee & Laura Taylor
U.S. Census Bureau Working Paper, January 2014
Abstract:
Compensating wages for workplace fatality and accident risks are used to infer the value of a statistical life (VSL), which in turn is used to assess the benefits of human health and safety regulations. The estimation of these wage differentials, however, has been plagued by measurement error and omitted variables. This paper employs the first quasi-experimental design within a labor market setting to overcome such limitations in the extant literature. Specifically, randomly assigned, exogenous federal safety inspections are used to instrument for plant-level risks and combined with confidential U.S. Census data on manufacturing employment to estimate the VSL using a difference-in-differences framework. The VSL is estimated to be between $2 and $4 million ($2011), suggesting prior studies may substantially overstate the value workers place on safety, and therefore, the benefits of health and safety regulations.
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Urban Land-Use Regulation: Are Homevoters Overtaking the Growth Machine?
Vicki Been, Josiah Madar & Simon McDonnell
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, June 2014, Pages 227–265
Abstract:
The leading theory about urban land-use regulation argues that city zoning officials are full partners in the business and real estate elite's “growth machine.” Suburban land-use officials, in contrast, are thought to cater to the interests of the majority of their electorate — “homevoters.” A unique database regarding over 200,000 lots that the New York City Planning Commission considered for rezoning between 2002 and 2009 allows us to test various hypotheses suggested by these competing theories of land-use regulation. Our analysis reveals that homevoters are more powerful in urban politics than scholars, policymakers, and judges have assumed.
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Land Use Regulations and the Value of Land and Housing: An Intra-Metropolitan Analysis
Nils Kok, Paavo Monkkonen & John Quigley
Journal of Urban Economics, May 2014, Pages 136–148
Abstract:
Inferences about the determinants of land prices in urban areas are typically based on housing transactions, which combine payments for land and long-lived improvements. In contrast, we investigate directly the determinants of urban land prices within a metropolitan area – the San Francisco Bay Area. Our analysis focuses on the relationship between the regulation of urban development within different jurisdictions and land prices, while considering other factors that shape the value of land, such as topography and access to jobs. We find that cities that require a greater number of independent reviews to obtain a building permit or a zoning change have higher land prices, ceteris paribus. Finally, we relate the variation in land prices to the prices paid for housing in the region and show that local land use regulations are closely linked to the value of houses sold. This is in part because regulations are so pervasive, and also because land values represent such a large fraction of house values in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Does Anyone Read the Fine Print? Consumer Attention to Standard-Form Contracts
Yannis Bakos, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler & David Trossen
Journal of Legal Studies, January 2014, Pages 1-35
Abstract:
A cornerstone of the law and economics approach to standard-form contracts is the informed-minority hypothesis: in competitive markets, a minority of term-conscious buyers is sufficient to discipline sellers from using unfavorable boilerplate terms. This argument is often invoked to limit intervention or regulate consumer transactions, but there has been little empirical investigation of its validity. We track the Internet browsing behavior of 48,154 monthly visitors to the Web sites of 90 online software companies to study the extent to which potential buyers access the end-user license agreement. We find that only one or two of every 1,000 retail software shoppers access the license agreement and that most of those who do access it read no more than a small portion. Since the cost of comparison shopping online is so low, the limiting factor in becoming informed thus seems not to be the cost of accessing license terms but reading and comprehending them.
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Unintended Consequences of Products Liability: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Market
Eric Helland et al.
NBER Working Paper, March 2014
Abstract:
In a complex economy, production is vertical and crosses jurisdictional lines. Goods are often produced by an upstream national or global firm and improved or distributed by local firms downstream. In this context, heightened products liability may have unintended consequences on product sales and consumer safety. Conventional wisdom holds that an increase in tort liability on the upstream firm will cause that firm to (weakly) increase investment in safety or disclosure. However, this may fail in the real-world, where upstream firms operate in many jurisdictions, so that the actions of a single jurisdiction may not be significant enough to influence upstream firm behavior. Even worse, if liability is shared between upstream and downstream firms, higher upstream liability may mechanically decrease liability of the downstream distributor and encourage more reckless behavior by the downstream firm. In this manner, higher upstream liability may perversely increase the sales of a risky good. We demonstrate this phenomenon in the context of the pharmaceutical market. We show that higher products liability on upstream pharmaceutical manufacturers reduces the liability faced by downstream doctors, who respond by prescribing more drugs than before.
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Employer Accommodation and Labor Supply of Disabled Workers
Matthew Hill, Nicole Maestas & Kathleen Mullen
RAND Working Paper, March 2014
Abstract:
The authors use longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine what factors influence employer accommodation of newly disabled workers and how effective such accommodations are in retaining workers and discouraging disability insurance applications. They find that only a quarter of newly disabled older workers are accommodated by their employers in some way following onset of a disability. Importantly, they find that few employer characteristics explain which workers are accommodated; rather, employee characteristics, particularly the presence of certain personality traits correlated with assertiveness and open communication, are highly predictive of accommodation. This suggests that policies targeting employer incentives may not be particularly effective at increasing accommodation rates since employers may not even be aware of their employees’ need for accommodation. They also find that if employer accommodation rates can be increased, disabled workers would be significantly more likely to delay labor force exit, at least for two years. However, they do not find significant effects on the disability insurance claiming margin.
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How Are Homeowners Associations Capitalized into Property Values?
Rachel Meltzer & Ron Cheung
Regional Science and Urban Economics, May 2014, Pages 93–102
Abstract:
Private homeowners associations (HOAs) levy binding fees and provide local services to members. Both should be capitalized into the value of member properties, but the net effect is ambiguous. We construct the most comprehensive, longitudinal database to date on HOAs for Florida and estimate the impact of HOAs on property values. We find properties in HOAs sell at a premium just under five percent. The premium is strongest immediately following HOA formation and declines over time, suggesting quick capitalization of HOA benefits. Properties in larger HOAs sell for less, and this is particularly true for properties in the biggest HOAs. Finally, properties located immediately outside of an HOA sell at a premium relative to other non-HOA properties, and this premium marginally decreases (increases) in the size (frequency) of neighboring HOAs.
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Property Institutions and Business Investment on American Indian Reservations
Randall Akee & Miriam Jorgensen
Regional Science and Urban Economics, May 2014, Pages 116–125
Abstract:
We test the hypothesis that property institutions are responsible for the persistent low levels of business and economic development on American Indian reservations. American Indian lands are held in trust by the US Federal government and may not be used as collateral. We exploit the uniform and equal distribution of land between the Agua Caliente tribe and non-Indians in Palm Springs, CA in our analysis. Due to the General Allotment Act of 1887, the land was divided in a checkerboard pattern with even-numbered parcels provided to Agua Caliente government or individual tribal members and odd-numbered parcels (held in fee-simple status) were sold to non-Indians. Because of this, we overcome the usual land quality selection problem between the two types of property institutions. We find that holding local amenities and other characteristics of the parcel constant, there is no difference in the level of business investment on trust and fee simple properties. These results indicate that the inability to use American Indian land as collateral does not drive the low levels of observed business investment; other mechanisms and institutions may be the culprit.
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Do Responsible Contractor Policies Increase Construction Bid Costs?
Jeffrey Waddoups & David May
Industrial Relations, April 2014, Pages 273–294
Abstract:
Beginning in 2000, some school districts in Ohio required contractors to incorporate health insurance coverage, among other items, into their bids. Such responsible contractor policies (RCPs) are controversial because they may raise costs. This study sheds empirical light on the controversy. We estimate construction bid costs using data on elementary school projects bid in Ohio from 1997 to 2008, some of which were covered by an RCP and others of which were not. The results indicate that once we account for variation in geographic location of schools, RCPs exert no statistically discernible impact on construction bid costs.
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When Does Regulation Distort Costs? Lessons from Fuel Procurement in U.S. Electricity Generation
Steve Cicala
NBER Working Paper, May 2014
Abstract:
This paper evaluates changes in fuel procurement practices by coal- and gas-fired power plants in the United States following state-level legislation that ended cost-of-service regulation of electricity generation. I find that deregulated plants substantially reduce the price paid for coal (but not gas), and tend to employ less capital-intensive sulfur abatement techniques relative to matched plants that were not subject to any regulatory change. Deregulation also led to a shift toward more productive coal mines. I show how these results lend support to theories of asymmetric information, capital bias, and regulatory capture as important sources of regulatory distortion.