We use data from the US airline industry to investigate whether firms that are under bankruptcy protection, as well as these firm's product market rivals, change the quality of the products they offer. We measure the quality of the services offered by a carrier using flight cancelations and delays, and the age of the aircraft used by the carrier. We find that delays and cancelations are less frequent during bankruptcy filings but return to their pre-bankruptcy levels once the bankrupt firm emerges from bankruptcy. We also find that firms use Chapter 11 filings to permanently reduce the age of their fleet. We do not find evidence of statistically and economically significant changes by the airline's competitors along any of the dimensions above.

We provide a practical method to estimate the payoff functions of players in complete information, static, discrete games. With respect to the empirical literature on entry games originated by Bresnahan and Reiss (1990) and Berry (1992), the main novelty of our framework is to allow for general forms of heterogeneity across players without making equilibrium selection assumptions. We allow the effects that the entry of each individual airline has on the profits of its competitors, its “competitive effects,” to differ across airlines. The identified features of the model are sets of parameters (partial identification) such that the choice probabilities predicted by the econometric model are consistent with the empirical choice probabilities estimated from the data. We apply this methodology to investigate the empirical importance of firm heterogeneity as a determinant of market structure in the U.S. airline industry. We find evidence of heterogeneity across airlines in their profit functions. The competitive effects of large airlines (American, Delta, United) are different from those of low cost carriers and Southwest. Also, the competitive effect of an airline is increasing in its airport presence, which is an important measure of observable heterogeneity in the airline industry. Then we develop a policy experiment to estimate the effect of repealing the Wright Amendment on competition in markets out of the Dallas airports. We find that repealing the Wright Amendment would increase the number of markets served out of Dallas Love.

We provide an econometric framework for estimating a game of simultaneous entry and pricing decisions while allowing for correlations between unobserved cost and demand shocks. We use our framework to account for selection in the pricing stage. We estimate the model using data from the US airline industry and find that not accounting for endogenous entry leads to biased estimation of demand elasticities. We simulate a merger between American and US Airways and find that product repositioning and postmerger outcomes depend on how we model the characteristics of the merged firm as a function of the premerger firms’ characteristics.

We investigate the allegation that legacy US airlines communicated via earnings calls to coordinate with other legacy airlines in offering fewer seats on competitive routes. To this end, we first use text analytics to build a novel dataset on communication among airlines about their capacity choices. Estimates from our preferred specification show that the number of offered seats is 2% lower when all legacy airlines in a market discuss the concept of “capacity discipline.” We verify that this reduction materializes only when legacy airlines communicate concurrently, and that it cannot be explained by other possibilities, including that airlines are simply announcing to investors their unilateral plans to reduce capacity, and then following through on those announcements.

In the U.S. airline industry, independent regional airlines fly passengers on behalf of several national airlines across different markets, giving rise to common subcontracting. On the one hand, we find that subcontracting is associated with lower prices, consistent with the notion that regional airlines tend to fly passengers at lower costs than major airlines. On the other hand, we find that common subcontracting is associated with higher prices. These two countervailing effects suggest that the growth of regional airlines can have anticompetitive implications for the industry.