Research
Applied microeconomics, with a focus on law & economics, industrial organization, and aviation.
Applied microeconomics, with a focus on law & economics, industrial organization, and aviation.
Most lawyers and legal scholars are familiar with the Blackstone ratio—"better that ten guilty persons escape, than one innocent suffer." That ratio recognizes that erroneous judicial decisions impose costs on society. The need to reduce error costs explains many aspects of criminal law, including the reasonable doubt standard of proof, which reflects the assumption that erroneous convictions are far more costly than erroneous acquittals. In the civil law context, however, error costs have received much less attention. Scholars generally assume that error costs are symmetrical—but as with criminal law, many areas of civil law involve asymmetric error costs, including antitrust, civil fraud, defamation, patent challenges, and cases involving liberty interests and other constitutional rights.
This article offers the first law-and-economics analysis of cheating on online exams. For many years, courts have analyzed cheating based on contractual or due-process principles, which rest on the assumption that the student and the university have reciprocal obligations whose violation imposes individual harm. A law-and-economics analysis shows, however, that cheating causes substantial social harms, which are neither factored into the current judicial treatment of cheating nor into the actions taken by faculty or administrators to prevent it.
Unlike airports in many other countries, which have been corporatized or privatized, nearly all U.S. airports continue to be operated by the public sector and subject to a system of economic regulation that provides little incentive to control costs or allocate capital efficiently. Yet despite its apparent shortcomings, the current system has persisted over several decades. This article provides an explanation for that persistence based on price theory, regulatory economics, and public-choice principles, offers supporting empirical evidence, and identifies factors that might lead to a different outcome.
The sheer number of drones, combined with their ability to fly quietly at low altitudes with cameras and other monitoring equipment, raises concerns about property rights and privacy. I begin by discussing how vertical property rights were cut back in the 1940s to accommodate the rise of commercial aviation, and then I apply a similar analysis to draw conclusions about vertical property rights in the drone era. The fundamental question addressed is how the balancing of privacy concerns and the interests of drone operators will influence the emergence of new rules governing minimum drone operating altitudes above private property.
Between 2001 and 2010, U.S. airlines suffered a collective net loss of over $58 billion. From 2011–2016, however, the situation changed dramatically: U.S. airlines reported a collective net profit of over $56 billion. What changed over this period and why? This article provides a partial explanation by examining changes in airline capacity growth following industry consolidation, and the relationship between airline capacity growth and industry revenue. I conclude that the industry's turnaround in profitability is the direct result of its success in restraining capacity, and I examine the consequences of using the GDP growth rate as the focal point for individual airline capacity-growth decisions.
Resource Guide to Airport Performance Indicators. Hazel, Robert; Jan Blais; Thomas Browne; & Daniel Benson. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. National Academies Press, 2011.
Airport Economics. In Jenkins, Darryl, ed., Handbook of Airline Economics (pp. 113–119). McGraw-Hill, 1995.
Airline Economic Analysis. Annual industry report for Raymond James Research, 2009 – 2014 (author / lead co-author).
In Commercial Drones, the Race Is On: Aviation's Fastest-Growing Sector Outpaces US Regulators. Oliver Wyman white paper, 2015.
Could Fuel Costs Be the Tipping Point? & Peak-Hour Pricing and Small Aircraft Don't Mix. Article series in McGraw-Hill Aviation Daily and Aviation Week, 2004 – 2005.