Essays on Empirical Industrial Organization and Environmental Economics
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation contributes to two major research areas: the analysis of endogenousproduct characteristics in structural models of demand and dynamic models of invasive species management. In the first chapter, I analyze claims of falling business travel demand in the US following the COVID-19 pandemic. I focus on the US domestic airline market in between 2019 and 2022 and construct a structural model of air travel demand that assumes heterogeneity in consumers takes two forms: business travellers and leisure travellers. I endogenize the number of daily departures on a given route to account for changes in fuel cost that may affect carriers’ flight frequency decisions. I find that both consumer “types” became less price-sensitive and average price elasticity increased. There was a large shift in the share of passengers from “leisure”-type to “business”-type. I interpret this as evidence that many leisure travellers behaved as business travellers during 2022 – forgoing their usual concerns about price to partake in revenge travel.. In the second chapter, I examine common ownership, or the phenomenon of several diversified, institutional investors owning overlapping shares in competing firms. Existing research has thus far highlighted the common ownership effects on pricing and entry, but the effects on non-price product characteristics has not drawn significant attention. I aim to fill this gap by analyzing deposit market competition. I build a structural model of bank branching decisions in the United States and estimate the cost of a bank branch implied by two different modes of conduct: own-profit maximization and common ownership. I find that if banks internalize the competitive effect of their branch networks on commonly-owned firms’ profits, the difference in implied branch cost is small. Indeed, a Vuong-type model selection test does not find a statistically significant difference between the two models’ ability to explain the observed data. In the third cha…
abstract: This dissertation contributes to two major research areas: the analysis of endogenousproduct characteristics in structural models of demand and dynamic models of invasive species management. In the first chapter, I analyze claims of falling business travel demand in the US following the COVID-19 pandemic. I focus on the US domestic airline market in between 2019 and 2022 and construct a structural model of air travel demand that assumes heterogeneity in consumers takes two forms: business travellers and leisure travellers. I endogenize the number of daily departures on a given route to account for changes in fuel cost that may affect carriers’ flight frequency decisions. I find that both consumer “types” became less price-sensitive and average price elasticity increased. There was a large shift in the share of passengers from “leisure”-type to “business”-type. I interpret this as evidence that many leisure travellers behaved as business travellers during 2022 – forgoing their usual concerns about price to partake in revenge travel.. In the second chapter, I examine common ownership, or the phenomenon of several diversified, institutional investors owning overlapping shares in competing firms. Existing research has thus far highlighted the common ownership effects on pricing and entry, but the effects on non-price product characteristics has not drawn significant attention. I aim to fill this gap by analyzing deposit market competition. I build a structural model of bank branching decisions in the United States and estimate the cost of a bank branch implied by two different modes of conduct: own-profit maximization and common ownership. I find that if banks internalize the competitive effect of their branch networks on commonly-owned firms’ profits, the difference in implied branch cost is small. Indeed, a Vuong-type model selection test does not find a statistically significant difference between the two models’ ability to explain the observed data. In the third cha…
author: Ewen, Sean Taylor
language: en_US
keywords: Economics
date published: 2024-10-16
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:58:03Z
provider: University of Washington
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Washington

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/1773/52476