David Gabel

• Queens College, CUNY

The FCCs decision to repeal Net Neutrality governance of Internet traffic has not ended the debate over whether such protections are needed. This paper investigates the effects of changes in Net Neutrality regulation through an event study that estimates the market model with event dummies. The results are striking: the biggest impact of Net Neutra...

Entry will occur most rapidly in a market where entrants incur few or no sunk costs, do not operate at a cost disadvantage, and where consumers can easily switch from the incumbent to the entrant. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the speed of entry in an in industry that is highly contestable, taxi rides. In recent years, firms like Uber ha...

Entry into the taxi industry involves few risks. Entrants have lower costs than the incumbents, sunk costs are small, and modern technology makes it easy to hail a cab using the Internet. Despite large scale entry and low barriers to entry, monopoly power persists. The persistence of monopoly power illustrates that new technologies may not quickly...

At a time when choices for voice service and funding for universal service were growing, the United States experienced an unprecedented drop in household telephone penetration. Universal service in voice telephony is generally taken for granted in the United States. However, recent data from the FCC shows a significant decline in the number of U.S....

This paper examines the concomitant effects that competition, regulation, market characteristics, and corporate ownership have on the deployment of advanced telecommunications services (ATS) to business customers through the econometric analysis of a rich data set that identifies the competitive, regulatory, and economic climate for each incumbent'...

Section 254(b)(3) of the 1996 Telecommunications Act established the objective that residents of rural areas should have access to advanced telecommunications and information services comparable to services in urban areas. Pursuant to the passage of the Act, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) established a new universal fund that provides...

Universal service in voice telephony is generally taken for granted in the United States. Once a policy for extending the monopoly network to include all citizens, modifications continue to be made to achieve the goal of full penetration in a competitive environment. The debate on universal service policy reform has included discussions of general...

There is growing sentiment that rate rebalancing to eliminate cross subsidies between local business and local residential telephone markets is necessary to induce efficient entry in the residential market. If the elasticity of supply with respect to the relative prices for business and residential local service is high in both the local business a...

This study examines the decisions of all incumbent local exchange companies (ILECs) in the United States to deploy advanced telecommunications services within each of their wire center serving areas. The advanced telecommunications services examined are packet switching, digital signal level (DS) transport, and synchronous optical network (SONET) t...

In this paper, we first discuss the concept of "Bill-and-Keep" whereby the party that receives a call pays for receiving the call. We explore if this outcome is efficient and consistent with competitive markets. Following the discussion of Bill-and-Keep we offer an explanation of why the flow of traffic has been imbalanced between incumbent local e...

Race on the Line explores a fascinating topic the impact that technology has on race and gender relations within a firm. Green ambitiously evaluates the impact of labor-saving technologies on employees within AT T during the period 1880 to 1980. The topic is explored through a thorough examination of archival material. She demonstrates a strong com...

Technology such as the Internet is becoming an important ingredient for economic and social advancement. There is a growing national concern about the ability of all segments of the American society to be able to access and benefit from advanced telecommunications services. In this research we estimate the impact that supply costs, demographic and...

A collection of research reports on policy issues involving telecommunications, particularly the Internet. Until the 1980s, it was presumed that technical change in most communications services could easily be monitored from centralized state and federal agencies. This presumption was long outdated prior to the commercialization of the Internet. Wi...

An abstract is not available.

Economic theory has long been concerned with determining the optimal pricing scheme for a multiproduct monopoly, but it has been quite difficult to make use of developments in practice. Using LECOM, the Local Exchange Cost Optimization Model, over three stylized city maps, and assuming price elasticity values taken from the literature for four stan...

While economies of scale and scope have been extensively studied in traditional telephone networks, thus far little academic attention has been paid to the effect of cellular communications, which is one of the most rapidly growing segments of the telecommunications system. We use LECOM--our Local Exchange Cost Optimization Model--to generate data...

Local exchange companies (LECs) have argued that, because of entry, they will no longer be able to subsidize residential exchange service. The available economic data show that residential service is not subsidized. This finding casts doubt over the need for entrants to contribute to a universal service fund that would be used to subsidize resident...

The re-emergence of AT T as the dominant firm in the telephone industry resulted from its adopting a predatory response to entrants. AT T's strategy was effective because government regulations and capital market imperfections provided the incumbent with a first-mover advantage that prevented challengers from entering simultaneously in all markets.

Using cost data generated by an optimization model, we evaluate the degree of economies of scope in the local telephone exchange market. We find that economies of scope between switched and non-switched services are a decreasing function of customer density, while there are strong economies of scope, regardless of customer density, within the switc...

The idea that a monopolist would adopt a pricing strategy to deter entry is found in a wide body of research. We explore why the monopolist in the American telephone industry, AT T, did not pursue such a strategy when its initial patents expired.

A utility's investments are included in the rate base if the expenditures can pass the “prudent” or “used and useful” tests. Regulators have a difficult time applying these tests to telephone companies because little is known about the demand for new services. Under current regulatory procedures, telephone companies face an incentive system which r...

Recently many scholars have argued that society's welfare would be increased if the price of local telephone service were increased, and the prices for toll and enhanced telecommunication services reduced. In this paper we argue that the telecommunications policy literature has largely ignored the impact of varying technical standards on the cost-o...

John Kwoka's article, 'The Effects of Divestiture, Privatization, and competition on Productivity in U.S. and U.K. Telecommunications', provides some valuable information regarding the impact of recent regulatory changes in the telecommunications industry. Kwoka is on the forefront in providing us with quantitative measurements of how changes in ma...

This article summarizes how new telecommunication services are affecting the design of networks, and examines how these developments can be taken into account in the identification of stand-alone and incremental costs. The results of applying cost models to Michigan Bell's current physical assets are reported. Contrary to received opinion, it is fo...

The 1996 Telecommunications Act has failed to promote competition in the provision of local telecommunication services. Is the solution to promote alternative approaches to end-user access, revert to the traditional model of natural monopoly regulation, or continue with the current hybrid regulation which regulates ILECs while simultaneously trying...