Dokument: Three Essays on Empirical Industrial Organization
| Titel: | Three Essays on Empirical Industrial Organization | |||||||
| URL für Lesezeichen: | https://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/servlets/DocumentServlet?id=43190 | |||||||
| URN (NBN): | urn:nbn:de:hbz:061-20170828-143659-9 | |||||||
| Kollektion: | Dissertationen | |||||||
| Sprache: | Englisch | |||||||
| Dokumententyp: | Wissenschaftliche Abschlussarbeiten » Dissertation | |||||||
| Medientyp: | Text | |||||||
| Autor: | Saric-Babin, Amela [Autor] | |||||||
| Dateien: |
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| Beitragende: | Prof. Dr. Haucap, Justus [Betreuer/Doktorvater] Prof. Dr. Annika Herr [Betreuer/Doktorvater] | |||||||
| Dewey Dezimal-Klassifikation: | 300 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie » 330 Wirtschaft | |||||||
| Beschreibung: | In this dissertation, I present three essays on empirical industrial organization. This field of economics concentrates on the structure of imperfectly competitive industries and on the behavior of firms and individuals in these industries. If markets fail to produce efficient outcomes, policy interventions need to minimize the impact of actions with significant negative spillovers. Thus, the issues addressed by the empirical industrial organization are intimately related to broader public policy questions, such as the antitrust stance towards concentrated industries or the design of regulatory mechanisms for industries with information asymmetries. In order to develop and implement sound policy measures, it is essential to understand the behavior of consumers and their interaction with the firms. In light of this, I analyze competition and regulation in two separate industries. The first essay focuses on the EU telecommunications market, while the rest deals with the German market for long-term care.
The telecommunications industry is dynamic, with a rapidly expanding range of services and technologies. The national telecommunications sectors were monopolized until 1990s, when the liberalizaton attempts by US and EU regulatory authorities led to unbundling of incumbent carriers. The competition was further fostered by the spread of mobile telephony, various broadband technologies and voice over IP services. Yet, the telecommunications market remains highly concentrated. Majority of high developed countries have three to four mobile providers, and 4-to-3 mergers took place in recent years in the Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Germany, and Italy. Moreover, the deployment and maintenance of high-speed broadband technologies are associated with high sunk costs, which creates entry barriers. Policy interventions must therefore reconcile the goal of economic efficiency on the one, and provide incentives for innovation and technological development on the other hand. In the first essay, I evaluate this issue in the context of telephony services. The German long-term care market is rapidly expanding due to aging population and increasing prevalence of age-related disabilities. The care-dependent population increased from 2 million in 1999 to 2.6 million in 2013, and is projected to rise to 3.4 million in 2030. Shortages of capital and qualified workforce pose substantial challenges for future care provision. At the same time, long-term care is a credence good. The choice of care facilities is associated with a priori uncertain quality, which can have severe negative implications on consumer welfare. The success of policies designed to address these issues hinges upon understanding the care recipients' behavior. The German long-term care market is particularly suitable to explore it, due to a free choice between different long-term care forms and facilities. Thus, in the second and third essay, I focus on consumer choice and welfare in the long-term care market. Chapter 2, under the title Substitution Between Fixed, Mobile, and Voice over IP Telephony - Evidence from the European Union, is co-authored by Mirjam R. J. Lange and published in Telecommunications Policy. This essay examines the regulation of EU market for telephony services in view of the changing industry landscape. The analysis of substitution between different types of telephony is the cornerstone of market definition and, therefore, of effective regulation. We explore the access substitution between fixed-lines, mobiles, and VoIP services in a unified EU cross-country framework. We employ a dataset for 20 EU countries for the 2008 – 2011 period, and apply dynamic panel data methods. We document a strong access substitution between fixed-lines and mobiles, and find indicative evidence of the substitution between fixed-lines and VoIP. Our results provide support for a joint market definition for the telephony services. This is in line with the European Commission's Recommendation on removal of access obligations from the market for fixed telephone networks. Chapter 3 is titled The Welfare Effects of Single Rooms in German Nursing Homes: A Structural Approach, and is co-authored by Annika Herr. In this essay, we explore the welfare effects of a single room policy in German nursing homes. This policy was promulgated in the federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg in 2009 with the goal of enhancing the quality of life of nursing home residents. North Rhine-Westphalia followed suit with the provision that at least 80% of nursing home places must be provided in single rooms by 2018. We use a comprehensive dataset including all German nursing homes providing full-time inpatient care for elderly between 2007 and 2009. We estimate a one-level nested logit model of demand and, based on the model of bargaining between payers and providers, recover the marginal costs and markups. We then analyze a counterfactual market in which only single rooms are offered. Higher consumer welfare materializes only if the supply of nursing home places does not decline. Considering the costs of restructuring the existing nursing homes, it may be more welfare-enhancing to stimulate investment in new facilities which would be obliged to provide exclusively single rooms. Chapter 4, with the title Regional Variation in the Use of Inpatient Long-Term Care in Germany: A Spatial Approach, explores county-level differences in the demand for nursing home care. The shares of county's care-dependent population in nursing homes varied between 49 and 175 percent of the national mean between 2007 and 2011. Considering high public expenditures and shortage of a qualified workforce, regional variation could reflect broader problems in provision. For example, under-utilization due to long travel and waiting times indicates problems in access to nursing homes. Over-utilization, on the other hand, could indicate a lack of alternatives to nursing home care. I analyze this divergence using a rich dataset containing information on the entire German care-dependent population, supply of long-term care services, and structural characteristics of the counties. In order to account for regional spillovers in the demand for nursing home care, I apply a spatial autoregressive model with autoregressive disturbance terms. The main explanatory factors of the observed regional variation are the care recipients' age, existence of informal support, and density of nursing home places. Spatial dependencies play a relatively minor role. Chapter 5 summarizes this dissertation and concludes. | |||||||
| Lizenz: |  Urheberrechtsschutz | |||||||
| Fachbereich / Einrichtung: | Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät » Volkswirtschaftslehre | |||||||
| Dokument erstellt am: | 28.08.2017 | |||||||
| Dateien geändert am: | 28.08.2017 | |||||||
| Promotionsantrag am: | 17.12.2014 | |||||||
| Datum der Promotion: | 17.07.2017 |
