Regulation and Incentives in European Aviation

We study the effect of liberalization on costs and competition in the European airline industry. We construct and estimate a model that includes demand, capacity, and cost equations. The latter accounts for inefficiency and cost-reducing effort. We show that failure to account for the choice of effort would lead to biased estimates of efficiency and competition in the industry. We also find that the last European Union package of deregulatory measures has led to significant efficiency improvements and has fostered competition