Three essays in empirical industrial organization

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20001086

The first chapter is titled "Competition and Service Quality: New Evidence from the Airline Industry." This paper examines the relationship between competition and service quality in the airline industry. Using panel data and two different instrumental variable (IV) strategies, it directly addresses potential biases in previous studies. One of the IV strategies exploits changes in local market structure generated by a merger between two airlines that operate on a global scale. While this variation in market structure does not occur in a controlled environment, its source, if not random, differs from the variation in market structure otherwise observed in the airline industry. The findings indicate the effect of competition on airline delays may be three times stronger than previous studies suggest. The validity of the merger as a source of exogenous variation is examined along several lines.