Job Market Paper

• Quality Competition in Mobile Telecommunications: Evidence from Connecticut
• Signal quality is a significant contributor to the overall quality of wireless telephone service, which competitive analyses often overlook. To understand how further consolidation in this industry would impact the competitive incentives for signal quality investment, I estimate demand and supply of wireless service using a proprietary market research survey and a unique Connecticut database of antenna facilities, or base stations. Dropped call rates and local coverage improve as base station density increases, so I treat base station density as an endogenous product characteristic and relate it to the local value of wireless service. On average, I find a 1% increase in base station density results in a market share gain of 0.038% to the investing firm and a loss of 0.008% for each rival. Marginal base station costs are implied to be substantial, so if these costs can be effectively reduced through network integration after a merger, the merging firms and consumers can both benefit through increased base station provision. If such integration is not possible, consumers lose due to either a loss in variety of products or reduced incentives of merged firms to provide quality. These results suggest that merger review must pay careful attention to the potential for network integration in wireless and related industries.

Works in Progress

• Price Adjustment During the Great Inflation Evidence from CPI Micro-Data (with Emi Nakamura, Jón Steinsson and Daniel Villar) 
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• Motives for Vertical Disintegration of Telecommunications Sites