IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/regeco/v52y2017i1d10.1007_s11149-017-9332-z.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Competition, vertical relationship and countervailing power in the UK airport industry

Author

Listed:
  • Anna Bottasso

    (University of Genova)

  • Martina Bruno

    (University of Genova)

  • Maurizio Conti

    (European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC))

  • Claudio Piga

    (Keele University)

Abstract

In this paper, we study whether competition in the airport market and the vertical interactions between upstream airports and downstream airlines influence the airport pricing decisions. Using a panel of the 24 largest UK airports, as well as a refined definition of airports’ market structure, we find that lower concentration in an airport’s catchment area and higher airlines countervailing power are associated to lower aeronautical charges.

Suggested Citation

  • Anna Bottasso & Martina Bruno & Maurizio Conti & Claudio Piga, 2017. "Competition, vertical relationship and countervailing power in the UK airport industry," Journal of Regulatory Economics, Springer, vol. 52(1), pages 37-62, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:kap:regeco:v:52:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s11149-017-9332-z
    DOI: 10.1007/s11149-017-9332-z
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11149-017-9332-z
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11149-017-9332-z?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Volodymyr Bilotkach & Joseph Clougherty & Juergen Mueller & Anming Zhang, 2012. "Regulation, privatization, and airport charges: panel data evidence from European airports," Journal of Regulatory Economics, Springer, vol. 42(1), pages 73-94, August.
    2. Haskel, Jonathan & Iozzi, Alberto & Valletti, Tommaso, 2013. "Market structure, countervailing power and price discrimination: The case of airports," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 12-26.
    3. Tae H. Oum & Xiaowen Fu, 2008. "Impacts of Airports on Airline Competition: Focus on Airport Performance and Airport-Airline Vertical Relations," OECD/ITF Joint Transport Research Centre Discussion Papers 2008/17, OECD Publishing.
    4. Blonigen, Bruce A. & Cristea, Anca D., 2015. "Air service and urban growth: Evidence from a quasi-natural policy experiment," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 128-146.
    5. Anna Bottasso & Maurizio Conti & Claudio Piga, 2013. "Low-cost carriers and airports' performance: empirical evidence from a panel of UK airports," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 22(3), pages 745-769, June.
    6. Joshua D. Angrist & Jörn-Steffen Pischke, 2009. "Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 8769.
    7. Douglas Staiger & James H. Stock, 1997. "Instrumental Variables Regression with Weak Instruments," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 65(3), pages 557-586, May.
    8. Stock, James H & Wright, Jonathan H & Yogo, Motohiro, 2002. "A Survey of Weak Instruments and Weak Identification in Generalized Method of Moments," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(4), pages 518-529, October.
    9. Fageda, Xavier & Flores-Fillol, Ricardo, 2016. "How do airlines react to airport congestion? The role of networks," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 73-81.
    10. Card, David, 2001. "Immigrant Inflows, Native Outflows, and the Local Labor Market Impacts of Higher Immigration," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 19(1), pages 22-64, January.
    11. Anna Bottasso & Maurizio Conti, 2012. "The Cost Structure of the UK Airport Industry," Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, University of Bath, vol. 46(3), pages 313-332, September.
    12. Choo, Yap Yin & Oum, Tae Hoon, 2013. "Impacts of low cost carrier services on efficiency of the major U.S. airports," Journal of Air Transport Management, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 60-67.
    13. Scotti, Davide & Malighetti, Paolo & Martini, Gianmaria & Volta, Nicola, 2012. "The impact of airport competition on technical efficiency: A stochastic frontier analysis applied to Italian airport," Journal of Air Transport Management, Elsevier, vol. 22(C), pages 9-15.
    14. Pels, Eric & Njegovan, Nenad & Behrens, Christiaan, 2009. "Low-cost airlines and airport competition," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 45(2), pages 335-344, March.
    15. Van Dender, Kurt, 2007. "Determinants of fares and operating revenues at US airports," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(2), pages 317-336, September.
    16. Daniel Albalate & Xavier Fageda, 2016. "High-Technology Employment and Transportation: Evidence from the European Regions," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 50(9), pages 1564-1578, September.
    17. David Starkie, 2008. "The Airport Industry in a Competitive Environment: A United Kingdom Perspective," OECD/ITF Joint Transport Research Centre Discussion Papers 2008/15, OECD Publishing.
    18. Starkie, David, 2002. "Airport regulation and competition," Journal of Air Transport Management, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 63-72.
    19. Yan, Jia & Oum, Tae Hoon, 2014. "The effect of government corruption on the efficiency of US commercial airports," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 119-132.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bergantino, Angela Stefania & Intini, Mario & Volta, Nicola, 2021. "The spatial dimension of competition among airports at the worldwide level: a spatial stochastic frontier analysis," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 295(1), pages 118-130.
    2. Bottasso, Anna & Conti, Maurizio & Vannoni, Davide, 2019. "Scale and (quasi) scope economies in airport technology. An application to UK airports," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 150-164.
    3. Ho, Chun-Yu & McCarthy, Patrick & Wang, Yanhao, 2021. "Competition and countervailing power: Evidence from the China Eastern and Shanghai Airlines merger," Journal of Air Transport Management, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).
    4. Pagliari, Romano & Graham, Anne, 2019. "An exploratory analysis of the effects of ownership change on airport competition," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 76-85.
    5. Martimort, David & Pommey, Guillaume & Pouyet, Jerome, 2022. "Optimal regulation design of airports: Investment incentives and impact of commercial services," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 164(C), pages 25-44.
    6. Oster, Clinton & Strong, John, 2021. "Economic effects of shifting airport activity in the Los Angeles metro region," Research in Transportation Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    7. Volodymyr Bilotkach & Harry Bush, 2020. "Airport competition from airports’ perspective: Evidence from a survey of European airports," Competition and Regulation in Network Industries, , vol. 21(3), pages 275-296, September.
    8. Pagliari, Romano & Graham, Anne, 2020. "Airport competition within the Scottish lowlands region," Research in Transportation Economics, Elsevier, vol. 79(C).
    9. Bergantino, Angela Stefania & Intini, Mario & Volta, Nicola, 2020. "Spatial competition and efficiency: an investigation in the airport sector," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 1287, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    10. Choo, Yap Yin & Corbo, Leonardo & Wang, Kun, 2018. "Joint impact of airline market structure and airport ownership on airport market power and profit margin," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 67-78.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Conti, Maurizio & Ferrara, Antonella Rita & Ferraresi, Massimiliano, 2019. "Did the EU Airport Charges Directive lead to lower aeronautical charges? Empirical evidence from a diff-in-diff research design," Economics of Transportation, Elsevier, vol. 17(C), pages 24-39.
    2. Bottasso, Anna & Conti, Maurizio & Vannoni, Davide, 2019. "Scale and (quasi) scope economies in airport technology. An application to UK airports," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 150-164.
    3. Haskel, Jonathan & Iozzi, Alberto & Valletti, Tommaso, 2013. "Market structure, countervailing power and price discrimination: The case of airports," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 12-26.
    4. Tiziana DíAlfonso & Cinzia Daraio & Alberto Nastasi, 2013. "Assesing the Impact of Competition on the Efficiency of Italian Airports," DIAG Technical Reports 2013-01, Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Universita' degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza".
    5. Choo, Yap Yin & Corbo, Leonardo & Wang, Kun, 2018. "Joint impact of airline market structure and airport ownership on airport market power and profit margin," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 67-78.
    6. Zhang, Anming & Czerny, Achim I., 2012. "Airports and airlines economics and policy: An interpretive review of recent research," Economics of Transportation, Elsevier, vol. 1(1), pages 15-34.
    7. Pavlyuk, Dmitry, 2012. "Airport Benchmarking and Spatial Competition: a Critical Review," MPRA Paper 43391, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Kenneth Button, 2020. "Studying the empirical implications of the liberalization of airport markets," Competition and Regulation in Network Industries, , vol. 21(3), pages 223-243, September.
    9. Milo Bianchi & Paolo Buonanno & Paolo Pinotti, 2012. "Do Immigrants Cause Crime?," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 10(6), pages 1318-1347, December.
    10. Doko Tchatoka, Firmin & Dufour, Jean-Marie, 2020. "Exogeneity tests, incomplete models, weak identification and non-Gaussian distributions: Invariance and finite-sample distributional theory," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 218(2), pages 390-418.
    11. Per G. Fredriksson & Khawaja A. Mamun, 2014. "Tobacco Politics and Electoral Accountability in the United States," Public Finance Review, , vol. 42(1), pages 4-34, January.
    12. Roberto Ezcurra & Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, 2017. "Does ethnic segregation matter for spatial inequality?," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 17(6), pages 1149-1178.
    13. Nikolaj Malchow-Møller & Jakob R. Munch & Jan Rose Skaksen, 2012. "Do Immigrants Affect Firm-Specific Wages?," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 114(4), pages 1267-1295, December.
    14. Marcelo Moreira & Geert Ridder, 2019. "Efficiency loss of asymptotically efficient tests in an instrumental variables regression," CeMMAP working papers CWP03/19, Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    15. Manuel Denzer, 2019. "Estimating Causal Effects in Binary Response Models with Binary Endogenous Explanatory Variables - A Comparison of Possible Estimators," Working Papers 1916, Gutenberg School of Management and Economics, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.
    16. Bettin, Giulia & Sacchi, Agnese, 2020. "Health spending in Italy: The impact of immigrants," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    17. Richard Adjei Dwumfour & Eric Fosu Oteng-Abayie & Emmanuel Kwasi Mensah, 2022. "Bank efficiency and the bank lending channel: new evidence," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 63(3), pages 1489-1542, September.
    18. Bernardo, Valeria & Fageda, Xavier, 2019. "Globalization, long-haul flights and inter-city connections," Economics of Transportation, Elsevier, vol. 19(C), pages 1-1.
    19. Franz Hackl & Michael Hölzl‐Leitner & Rudolf Winter‐Ebmer & Christine Zulehner, 2021. "Successful retailer strategies in price comparison platforms," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(5), pages 1284-1305, July.
    20. Minetti, Raoul & Murro, Pierluigi & Paiella, Monica, 2015. "Ownership structure, governance, and innovation," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 165-193.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Airport; Competition; Countervailing power; Vertical relations;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L93 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Air Transportation
    • D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
    • R40 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Transportation Economics - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:regeco:v:52:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s11149-017-9332-z. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.