Fox, Jeremy2024-01-232024-01-232023-122023-11-27December 2Otani, Suguru. "Three Essays on Industrial Organization and Shipping Industry." (2023) PhD diss., Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/115374https://hdl.handle.net/1911/115374In Chapter 1, I investigate how explicit cartels, known as ``shipping conferences", in a global container shipping market facilitated the formation of one of the largest globally integrated markets through entry, exit, and shipbuilding investment of shipping firms. Using novel data, I develop and construct a structural model and find that the cartels shifted shipping prices by 20-50\% and encouraged firms' entry and investment. In the counterfactual, I find that cartels would increase producer surplus while slightly decreasing consumer surplus, then may increase social welfare by encouraging firms' entry and shipbuilding investment. This would validate industry policies controlling prices and quantities in the early stage of the new industry, which may not be always harmful. Investigating hypothetical allocation rules supporting large or small firms, I find that the actual rule based on tonnage shares is the best to maximize social welfare. In Chapter 2, I present a structural empirical model of a one-sided one-to-many matching with complementarities to quantify the effect of subsidy design on endogenous merger matching. I investigate shipping mergers and consolidations in Japan in 1964. At the time, 95 firms formed six large groups. I find that the existence of unmatched firms enables us to recover merger costs, and the importance of technological diversification varies across carrier and firm types. The counterfactual simulations show that 20 \% of government subsidy expenditures could have been cut. The government could have possibly changed the equilibrium number of groups to between one and six. In Chapter 3 (with Yuri Matsumura), we assess the finite sample performance of the conduct parameter estimation and test in homogeneous goods markets numerically and theoretically. Statistical power rises with an increase in the number of markets, a larger conduct parameter, and a stronger demand rotation instrument. However, even with a moderate number of markets and five firms, regardless of instrument strength and the utilization of optimal instruments, rejecting the null hypothesis of perfect competition remains challenging. Our findings indicate that empirical results that fail to reject perfect competition are a consequence of the limited number of markets rather than methodological deficiencies.application/pdfengCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.Industrial OrganizationMatchingDynamicsCartelsContainer ShippingThesis2024-01-23