She's back!

As some may have noticed, my blogging habit has become, well, non-existent in the last half of this year. I'm here now to rectify that, by giving a bit of a wrap-up of the year, at least in terms of what I have been up to.

First of all, I began my new job at RBB Economics in London in August this year. RBB had offered me a job in about March, and I accepted the post towards the end of my course at the LSE. RBB is an economic consulting firm specialising in competition economics. Basically, we analyse the economics of cases where competition law appears to have been infringed.

One of my first cases was an excess pricing case. The plaintiff was a company called At The Races (ATR); they broadcast British and Irish horseraces to the UK, Ireland, and a number of other countries, including Australia. ATR claimed that they were being charged an excessively high price by the British Horseracing Board (BHB) for the information that ATR shows with the horseracing pictures (i.e. information on the horses, jockeys, colours, starting positions and so forth). We were hired by ATR to explain the economics of the case to the court. This involved things such as defining the product, the market, and then working out whether the price BHB was charging to ATR was excessive. On the other side, BHB hired economists (one of which was my supervisor from last year at LSE!) to show that BHB's price was not excessively high.

Now, one of the first rules of economics is that economists never agree, and this was certainly true for this case. Happily, however, our side convincingly won the case on all points. Some of the press the judgement received can be seen here: