The Determinants of Airport Hub Locations, Service, and Competition

Although the airline industry has been studied extensively since passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, relatively little effort has gone into examining how hub location affects the level of service and degree of competition found at airports in the system. To help close this gap, we investigate the geographic distribution of airline hub operations, the level of service, and the extent of competition at 112 major U.S. airports, extending previous work by Bauer (1987) and Butler and Huston (1989). Our key innovation is that we derive our measures of service and competition from indicator matrices that describe each airline’s route system.