Essays on Industrial Organization

Abstract

This dissertation comprises three essays on industrial organization. The first essay studies how product-level entry and exit decisions impact business and public policy analysis. It provides an empirical model that incorporates these decisions and then estimates it in the context of the commercial vehicle segment of the US automotive industry. Finally, it demonstrates the importance of accounting for product-level changes using the $85 billion decision to rescue two US automakers in 2009. The second essay studies how two period strategies perform relative to Markov perfect strategies in discrete dynamic games. In particular, it considers a simple entry/exit game and shows that agents sacrifice very little in terms of expected discounted payoffs when they employ these simpler strategies. It also shows this result is robust to varying the underlying market characteristics. The third essay estimates the causal impact of research expenditures on scientific output. Unexpected college football outcomes provide exogenous variation to university funds, and in turn, research expenditures in the subsequent year. Using this variation, it estimates the dollar elasticity of scholarly articles, new patent applications, and the citations that accrue to each.