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Working Paper
The Economic Impact of a Casino Monopoly: Evidence from Atlantic City
New Jersey voters approved legalized gambling for Atlantic City in a 1976 referendum, making it the second state after Nevada in 1931. The state explicitly leveraged the city's regional monopoly, which it held from 1978 through 1992, on casinos east of the Mississippi River as an economic development strategy to revive the blighted seaside resort town. The literature on the economic development effects of casinos suggests that sparsely populated areas without nearby competing gambling venues tend to benefit the most. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I model the economic impact of ...
Working Paper
Costly Information Intermediation as a Natural Monopoly
In this paper, we show that information trade has similar characteristics to a natural monopoly, where competition may be detrimental to efficiency due either to the duplication of direct costs or the slowing down of information dissemination. We present a model with two large populations in which consumers are randomly matched to providers on a period-by-period basis. Despite a moral hazard problem, cooperation can be sustained through an institution that gives incentives to information exchange. We consider different information pricing mechanisms (membership vs. buy and sell) and different ...