An empirical investigation of United States telecommunication policies.
详细信息
文摘
In the three chapters of my dissertation, I investigate the effect of policy changes in telecommunication industry using various econometric methods.;The first chapter studies the competition in the interexchange telecommunication market. Using an econometric model that allows the nature of the oligopoly interaction to be determined by the data, we estimate residual demand elasticities for the switched inter LATA services of AT&T, MCI and Sprint. For the nine year period 1989:3–1998:1, these estimates fall in the relatively inelastic ?1.5 to ?1.9 range, indicating that on average more than 50 percent of the long distance service price can be attributed to the carriers' monopoly power. Statistical tests reject hypotheses of perfect competition and a Cournot interaction, but do not reject the hypothesis of a coordinated oligopoly.;I measure the price effects of incentive regulation plans relative to rate-based rate of return in the second chapter. Demand, cost and supply equilibrium equations are estimated in a way that permits these effects to be identified as deriving either form changes in cost efficiency or changes in the competitive structure of the markets. The data indicate price cap plans provide cost efficiencies that are price reducing and, somewhat surprisingly, changes in the competitive structure that are price increasing. Both of these effects occur immediately after implementation and persist in the long term. In contrast, the sliding-scale and incentive rate of return reforms produce significant price effects of this same sort only after 6years of implementation.;In the third chapter I measure the impact of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 using event study methods based on the carriers' security market return. Capital market data for nineteen carriers beginning one year prior to the enactment of the Act and ending one year after the FCC's implementation orders, provide mixed evidence that the Act has had its intended effect: the Act produced no excess returns, positive or negative, for the ILECs, but produced positive excess returns for the CLECs, totaling 1.2 percent of their market value, and negative excess returns for the IXCs, totaling 0.6 percent of their market value.