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Governments often make public announcements that call into question firms' misuse of market power. Yet little is known about how firms respond to them. We study gasoline retailers' price responses to antitrust announcements shaming them for price gouging during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify price effects using a high-frequency event-study leveraging unique real-time station-level price data and well-identified, discrete antitrust announcements. We find evidence of announcement effects that depend on firms' preannouncement margins and hence exposure to being publicly shamed. Public statements by antitrust questioning firms' misuse of market power can indeed contain signals that affect equilibrium outcomes.

Despite recent attention to the role of competition in determining health outcomes in developed nations, little is known about how market power impedes access to quality care in lower-income countries. This paper studies the effects of policy changes that stopped collusion among firms supplying insulin to one of Mexico’s largest health care providers. I document increased insulin utilization and decreased diabetes complications and mortality following the sudden drop in insulin prices caused by the cartel’s collapse. These adverse health outcomes expand the assessment of damages caused by the cartel. The findings highlight the importance of market design policies in health markets, particularly for low- and middle-income countries.

This paper investigates the how government outsourcing affects efficiency and expenditures by considering how outsourcing decisions are determined along two dimensions: (i) cost differences between private firms and government suppliers of public goods and (ii) dynamics arising from cost complementarities and capacity constraints. I formulate and estimate a dynamic model of government outsourcing using project-level data from the dredging industry. Model estimates indicate substantial cost savings due to outsourcing but also that government presence in the market yields cost reduction. A counterfactual policy featuring direct competition between government and private sector firms finds a total expenditure reduction of 15.7 percent. (JEL D44, H41, H57, L84)

This paper develops an approach for identifying and estimating the distribution of valuations in ascending auctions where an indeterminate number of bidders have an unknown number of bidding opportunities. To finesse the complications for identification and estimation due to multiple equilibria, our empirical analysis is based on the fact that bidders play undominated strategies in every equilibrium. We apply the model to a monthly financial market in which local banks compete for deposit securities. This market features frequent jump bidding and winning bids well above the highest losing bid, suggesting standard empirical approaches for ascending auctions may not be suitable. We find that frictions are costly both for revenue and allocative efficiency.

This paper uses consolidation in the barge shipping industry to investigate the efficiencies generated by mergers in congested transportation markets. We study a merger between two barge shipping companies operating on congested transportation routes in the US inland waterway system. Using geographic variation in how the merger impacts traffic volume concentration, we estimate the effects of increased concentration on delays at congested bottlenecks using a novel data set of over one million linked vessel-firm delay observations. The results indicate that the merger decreased delays by 7% on average, suggesting substantial efficiency gains due to increased concentration. These findings have implications for optimal congestion pricing, transportation infrastructure investment, and merger review.