This paper offers a direct econometric test of the proposition that U.S. merger activity has occurred in waves. The authors fit a set of sine waves to the annual time-series data on mergers and find that the sine curves generally provide significant explanatory power. The parameters are statistically significant and reasonable in magnitudes, and the implied timing of peaks and troughs in merger activity is close to the actual dates of the peaks and troughs in the data. Thus, this formal test confirms what others have observed impressionistically: the data are consistent with a wave characterization.

Many services provide outputs that depend partially on the customers as inputs; the presence of other customers often contributes to the output experienced by each purchaser. Higher education is the premier example; others are legion. We provide a simple model that addresses the questions of competitive pricing and allocative efficiency for these types of services. Prices that charge customers for what they get on net (output minus input) from the firm both are competitive and support efficient allocations; these prices internalize the apparent external effects of customers on each other. Few examples of such prices exist in the real world.

The reciprocal interlocking of chief executive officers is a non-trivial phenomenon: among large companies in 1991, about one company in seven was in a relationship whereby the CEO of one company sat on a second company's board and the second company's CEO sat on the first company's board. We develop hypotheses to distinguish whether this practice furthers the interests of shareholders or the private interests of the CEOs. Using a sample of large companies, we employ a probit model to test these hypotheses. Our empirical findings are that these reciprocal CEO interlocks primarily benefit the CEOs rather than their shareholders.

Kenneth D. Garbade, William L. Silber, Lawrence J. White, Market Reaction to the Filing of Antitrust Suits: An Aggregate and Cross-Sectional Analysis, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Nov., 1982), pp. 686-691

In this paper, we empirically estimate the costs of delay in the FDIC's closures of 433 commercial banks between 2007 and 2014 based upon a counterfactual closure regime. We find that the costs of delay could have been as high as 18.5 billion, or 37% of the FDIC's estimated costs of closure of 49.8 billion. We think that these findings call for a more aggressive stance by bank regulators with respect to the provisions for loan losses and write-downs of banks’ non-performing assets. More aggressive (and earlier) provisions and write-downs, or adoption of a capital ratio that penalizes nonperforming loans, would allow the concept of “prompt corrective action” (PCA) to play the role that it was meant to play in reducing FDIC losses from insolvent banks.

A monopolist that sells in a market in which consumers differ in their willingness to pay for quality will distort and enlarge the range of products offered for sale. We examine the positive and normative impacts of remedies used to counteract such distortions. For the case of a price ceiling, the monopolist improves quality at the low quality end of the market, offsetting the distortion induced by the unregulated exercise of monopoly power. Social welfare can be shown to increase for a sufficiently slight degree of price regulation. For minimum quality standards, the social welfare implications are ambiguous because the standards may exclude some consumers from the market.

The informational opacity of small businesses makes them an interesting area for the study of banks' lending practices and procedures. We use data from a survey of small businesses to analyze the micro level differences in the loan approval processes of large and small banks. We provide evidence that large banks ($1 billion or more in assets) employ standard criteria obtained from financial statements in the loan decision process, whereas small banks rely to a greater extent on information about the character of the borrower. These cookie-cutter and character approaches are compatible with the incentives and environments facing large and small banks.