Essays in Industrial Organization

Abstract

In two essays, we examine several problems in industrial organization. In the first essay, we study the effectiveness of partially-privatized Medicare by estimating the costs that private firms face when providing care equivalent to that of the public sector. In contrast to previous studies, we take a dynamic approach, driven by the idea that consumers face large switching costs. We find that private firms face higher costs than the government after adjusting for patient characteristics and generosity of benefits. The second essay focuses on the effectiveness of U.S. merger policy by studying the acquisition behaviors of cable telecommunication companies. We construct a novel dataset of acquisitions in the cable industry from 2000-2012 and find the Hart-Scott-Rodino disclosure threshold only affects firm behavior when acquiring firms with overlapping geographic coverage areas.