Tag: Bureau of Economics

Despite being a widely used tool in merger enforcement, there have been few studies of whether antitrust divestitures are successful. We help fill this void by conducting a study of the divestitures...

The Federal Trade Commission initiated a Hospital Merger Retrospective Project in 2002 to analyze the effects of consummated mergers. One of the mergers studied was the 1998 acquisition by New Hanover...

We provide an in-depth analysis of the price effects of two hospital mergers that occurred in the north shore suburbs of Chicago in early 2000: Evanston Northwestern Healthcare’s (ENH) purchase of...

This study examines accuracy in consumer credit reports using a nationally representative sample of consumers with credit histories. Participants in the study examined their credit reports from the...

We conduct a retrospective study of the Sutter-Summit hospital merger to assess whether antitrust enforcement in this matter was appropriate. This consummated merger combined two hospitals located...

Economics at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) supports both the competition and consumer protection missions of the agency. In this year’s essay we discuss competition activity with a summary of our...

We estimate the effect of education and student status on the propensity to smoke. Our estimation strategy accounts for the endogeneity of education by “differencing out” the impact of unobserved...

This study reports the results of the Federal Trade Commission’s second statistical survey of fraud in the United States. The survey found that 30.2 million adults – 13.5 percent of the adult...

In a paper in the March 2004 AER, Justine Hastings concludes that the acquisition of an independent gasoline retailer, Thrifty, by a vertically integrated firm, ARCO, is associated with sizable price...

Economics at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) supports both the competition and consumer protection missions of the agency. In this year’'s essay we discuss two issues, one from each of the agency’...

This study examines the effect of credit-based insurance scores on the price and availability of automobile insurance and the impact of such scores on racial and ethnic minority groups and on low...

While retail sales are an important economic phenomenon, previous research has not explored how the multiproduct nature of consumers’ purchasing decisions affects the pricing dynamics of multiproduct...

This study presents the results of 36 in-depth interviews with recent mortgage customers, and quantitative consumer testing with over 800 mortgage customers, that examined how consumers search for...

This study provides a comprehensive assessment of the amount and type of television advertising seen by children in 2004 and compares these results to similar studies conducted for the Federal Trade...

We examine retail gasoline station pricing using three years of weekly prices for 272 stations in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. We report a number of new empirical findings about station...