Who Bears the Welfare Costs of Monopoly? The Case of the Credit Card Industry

Abstract We measure the distribution of welfare losses from non-competitive behaviour in the U.S. credit card industry during the 1970s and 1980s. The early credit card industry was characterized by regional monopolies. Ensuing legal decisions led to competitive reforms that resulted in greater, but still limited, oligopolistic competition. We measure the distributional consequences of these reforms by developing and estimating a heterogeneous …