Last Second Comebacks: Examining Influencers of Bankruptcy Success
by Eric Junzhe Zhang Abstract The American bankruptcy system allows for companies to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to protect their assets from creditors and reorganize their business operations to continue operating after going through bankruptcy court. While the process is meant to help improve the financial health and business operations of companies after they […]
Beyond the But-For World: Weak-necessity causal reasoning for model-based counterfactuals in law and economics
by Lilia Qian Abstract Under current standards for scientific evidence defined under Daubert, antitrust models are frequently excluded from legal consideration, but not always for reasons that make them genuinely unreliable. This paper clarifies why antitrust models face difficulties when subjected to methodological scrutiny: the employment of model-based counterfactual arguments under an epistemically defective ‘but-for’ […]
Evaluation of the Impact of New Rules in FCC’s Spectrum Incentive Auction
By Elizabeth Lim, Akshaya Trivedi and Frances Mitchell On March 29, 2016, the FCC initiated its first ever two-sided spectrum auction. The auction closed approximately one year later, having repurposed a total of 84 megahertz (MHz) of spectrum. The “Incentive Auction” included three primary components: (1) a reverse auction where broadcasters bid on the price […]
Small Bidder Preferences in FCC Spectrum Auctions
By Alexandra Zrenner and Chidinma Hannah Nnoromele The Federal Communications Commission faces a congressional mandate to ensure the participation of small business in its spectrum auctions. The FCC addresses this mandate using preferences for small bidders. This paper examines the impact on auction competition and outcomes of two preferences: bid credits and closed licenses. Bid […]
Market Power & Reciprocity Among Vertically Integrated Cable Providers
By Jeffery Shih-kai Shen This paper seeks to investigate the effects of vertical integration on the cable industry. There are two main goals that the research paper will attempt to address. The first is to build upon existing research on favoritism shown by multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to affiliated video programming networks. Second, the […]
Measuring the Likelihood of Small Business Loan Default: Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and the use of Credit-Scoring to Minimize Default Risk1
By Andrea Coravos Community development financial institutions (CDFIs) provide financial services to underserved markets and populations. Using small business loan portfolio data from a national CDFI, this paper identifies the specific borrower, lender, and loan characteristics and changes in economic conditions that increase the likelihood of default. These results lay the foundation for an in-house […]
The Financial Impact of the Oil Pollution Act: Do the Penalties Resulting from Oil Spills Fulfill the Purpose of the OPA?
by Melissa Keever Abstract This paper explores the financial impact of the Oil Pollution Act (OPA) on oil companies for oil spills. Total penalty per barrel, including civil and criminal penalties, and total cost per barrel for oil spills are analyzed prior OPA and post OPA. Difference-in-differences estimation is used to determine if penalties and […]
