11.4The Great Deregulation Experiment

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11.4 The Great Deregulation Experiment

LEARNING OBJECTIVES By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Evaluate the effectiveness of price regulation and antitrust policy
• Explain regulatory capture and its significance

Governments at all levels across the United States have regulated prices in a wide range of industries. In some cases, like water and electricity that have natural monopoly characteristics, there is some room in economic theory for such regulation. However, once politicians are given a basis to intervene in markets and to choose prices and quantities, it is hard to know where to stop.

Doubts about Regulation of Prices and Quantities

Beginning in the 1970s, it became clear to policymakers of all political leanings that the existing price regulation was not working well. The United States carried out a great policy experiment—the deregulation that we discussed in Monopoly—removing government controls over prices and quantities produced in airlines, railroads, trucking, intercity bus travel, natural gas, and bank interest rates. The Clear It Up discusses the outcome of deregulation in one industry in particular—airlines. CLEAR IT UP What are the results of airline deregulation? Why did the pendulum swing in favor of deregulation? Consider the airline industry. In the early days of air travel, no airline could make a profit just by flying passengers. Airlines needed something else to carry and the Postal Service provided that something with airmail. Thus, the first U.S. government regulation of the airline industry happened through the Postal Service, when in 1926 the Postmaster General began giving airlines permission to fly certain routes based on mail delivery needs—and the airlines took some passengers along for the ride. In 1934, the antitrust authorities charged the Postmaster General with colluding with the major airlines of that day to monopolize the nation’s airways. In 1938, the U.S. government created the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) to regulate airfares and routes instead. For 40 years, from 1938 to 1978, the CAB approved all fares, controlled all entry and exit, and specified which airlines could fly which routes. There was zero entry of new airlines on the main routes across the country for 40 years, because the CAB did not think it was necessary. In 1978, the Airline Deregulation Act took the government out of the business of determining airfares and schedules. The new law shook up the industry. Famous old airlines like Pan American, Eastern, and Braniff went bankrupt and disappeared. Some new airlines like People Express were created—and then vanished. The greater competition from deregulation reduced airfares by about one-third over the next two decades, saving consumers billions of dollars a year. The average flight used to take off with just half its seats full; now it is two- thirds full, which is far more efficient. Airlines have also developed hub-and-spoke systems, where planes all fly into a central hub city at a certain time and then depart. As a result, one can fly between any of the spoke cities with just one connection—and there is greater service to more cities than before deregulation. With lower fares and more service, the number of air passengers doubled from the late 1970s to the start of the 2000s—an increase that, in turn, doubled the number of jobs in the airline industry. Meanwhile, with the watchful oversight of government safety inspectors, commercial air travel has continued to get safer over time. The U.S. airline industry is far from perfect. For example, a string of mergers in recent years has raised concerns over how competition might be compromised. One difficulty with government price regulation is what economists call regulatory capture, in which the firms that are supposedly regulated end up playing a large role in setting the regulations that they will follow. When the airline industry was regulated, for example, it suggested appointees to the regulatory board, sent lobbyists to argue with the board, provided most of the information on which the board made decisions, and offered well-paid jobs to at least some of the people leaving the board. In this situation, it is easy for regulators to poorly represent consumers. The result of regulatory capture is that government price regulation can often become a way for existing competitors to work together to reduce output, keep prices high, and limit competition.

The Effects of Deregulation

Deregulation, both of airlines and of other industries, has its negatives. The greater pressure of competition led to entry and exit. When firms went bankrupt or contracted substantially in size, they laid off workers who had to find other jobs. Market competition is, after all, a full-contact sport. A number of major accounting scandals involving prominent corporations such as Enron, Tyco International, and WorldCom led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002. The government designed Sarbanes-Oxley to increase confidence in financial information provided by public corporations to protect investors from accounting fraud. The Great Recession, which began in late 2007, was caused at least in part by a global financial crisis, which began in the United States. The key component of the crisis was the creation and subsequent failure of several types of unregulated financial assets, such as collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs, a type of mortgage- backed security), and credit default swaps (CDSs, insurance contracts on assets like CMOs that provided a payoff even if the holder of the CDS did not own the CMO). Private credit rating agencies such as Standard & Poors, Moody’s, and Fitch rated many of these assets very safe. The collapse of the markets for these assets precipitated the financial crisis and led to the failure of Lehman Brothers, a major investment bank, numerous large commercial banks, such as Wachovia, and even the Federal National Mortgage Corporation (Fannie Mae), which had to be nationalized—that is, taken over by the federal government. One response to the financial crisis was the Dodd-Frank Act, which majorly attempted to reform the financial system. The legislation’s purpose, as noted on dodd-frank.com is: To promote the financial stability of the United States by improving accountability and transparency in the financial system, to end “too big to fail,” to protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts, [and] to protect consumers from abusive financial services practices. . . All market-based economies operate against a background of laws and regulations, including laws about enforcing contracts, collecting taxes, and protecting health and the environment. The government policies that we discussed in this chapter—like blocking certain anticompetitive mergers, ending restrictive practices, imposing price cap regulation on natural monopolies, and deregulation—demonstrate the role of government to strengthen the incentives that come with a greater degree of competition. BRING IT HOME More than Cooking, Heating, and Cooling What did the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) decide on the Kinder Morgan / El Paso Corporation merger? After careful examination, federal officials decided there was only one area of significant overlap that might provide the merged firm with strong market power. The FTC approved the merger, provided Kinder Morgan divest itself of the overlap area. Tallgrass purchased Kinder Morgan Interstate Gas Transmission, Trailblazer Pipeline Co. LLC, two processing facilities in Wyoming, and Kinder Morgan’s 50 percent interest in the Rockies Express Pipeline to meet the FTC requirements. The FTC was attempting to strike a balance between potential cost reductions resulting from economies of scale and concentration of market power. Did the price of natural gas decrease? Yes, rather significantly. In 2010, the wellhead price of natural gas was $4.48 per thousand cubic foot. In 2012 the price had fallen to just $2.66. Was the merger responsible for the large drop in price? The answer is uncertain. The larger contributor to the sharp drop in price was the overall increase in the supply of natural gas. Increasingly, more natural gas was able to be recovered by fracturing shale deposits, a process called fracking. Fracking, which is controversial for environmental reasons, enabled the recovery of known reserves of natural gas that previously were not economically feasible to tap. Kinder Morgan’s control of 80,000-plus miles of pipeline likely made moving the gas from wellheads to end users smoother and allowed for an even greater benefit from the increased supply.

Key Terms

acquisition when one firm purchases another antitrust laws laws that give government the power to block certain mergers, and even in some cases to break up large firms into smaller ones bundling a situation in which multiple products are sold as one concentration ratio an early tool to measure the degree of monopoly power in an industry; measures what share of the total sales in the industry are accounted for by the largest firms, typically the top four to eight firms cost-plus regulation when regulators permit a regulated firm to cover its costs and to make a normal level of profit exclusive dealing an agreement that a dealer will sell only products from one manufacturer four-firm concentration ratio the percentage of the total sales in the industry that are accounted for by the largest four firms Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) approach to measuring market concentration by adding the square of the market share of each firm in the industry market share the percentage of total sales in the market merger when two formerly separate firms combine to become a single firm price cap regulation when the regulator sets a price that a firm cannot exceed over the next few years regulatory capture when the supposedly regulated firms end up playing a large role in setting the regulations that they will follow and as a result, they “capture” the people usually through the promise of a job in that “regulated” industry once their term in government has ended restrictive practices practices that reduce competition but that do not involve outright agreements between firms to raise prices or to reduce the quantity produced tying sales a situation where a customer is allowed to buy one product only if the customer also buys another product

Key Concepts and Summary

11.1 Corporate Mergers

A corporate merger involves two private firms joining together. An acquisition refers to one firm buying another firm. In either case, two formerly independent firms become one firm. Antitrust laws seek to ensure active competition in markets, sometimes by preventing large firms from forming through mergers and acquisitions, sometimes by regulating business practices that might restrict competition, and sometimes by breaking up large firms into smaller competitors. A four-firm concentration ratio is one way of measuring the extent of competition in a market. We calculate it by adding the market shares—that is, the percentage of total sales—of the four largest firms in the market. A Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) is another way of measuring the extent of competition in a market. We calculate it by taking the market shares of all firms in the market, squaring them, and then summing the total. The forces of globalization and new communications and information technology have increased the level of competition that many firms face by increasing the amount of competition from other regions and countries.

11.2 Regulating Anticompetitive Behavior

Antitrust authorities block firms from openly colluding to form a cartel that will reduce output and raise prices. Companies sometimes attempt to find other ways around these restrictions and, consequently, many antitrust cases involve restrictive practices that can reduce competition in certain circumstances, like tie-in sales, bundling, and predatory pricing.

11.3 Regulating Natural Monopolies

In the case of a natural monopoly, market competition will not work well and so, rather than allowing an