Maximum employee work-hour restrictions are implemented to reduce accidents. However, because they decrease the stock of work-hours available to employers, they may also have detrimental effects. A quasi-experiment suggests that pilot hours-of-service reforms, which decreased the number of flights and hours a pilot may work, reduced consumer choice and increased fares in the airline industry. We find that regional and low-cost carriers reduced scheduled flight frequency, while less constrained legacy carriers (and potentially their wholly owned subsidiaries) were unaffected. Further, we find evidence that market concentration increased on many routes, implying that fare increases may be due to a decrease in competition. These findings illustrate a situation where a policy implemented to correct one market failure, airlines not internalizing the full social costs of accidents by allowing dangerously fatigued pilots to fly, exacerbated another market failure by decreasing competition.

中文翻译：

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员工服务时间规定对美国航空业的影响

实施最长员工工作时间限制以减少事故。然而，由于它们减少了雇主可用的工作时间存量，它们也可能产生不利影响。一项准实验表明，飞行员服务时间改革减少了飞行员的飞行次数和工作时间，减少了消费者的选择，并增加了航空业的票价。我们发现区域性和低成本航空公司减少了定期航班频率，而受限制较少的传统航空公司（及其可能的全资子公司）不受影响。此外，我们发现有证据表明许多航线的市场集中度有所增加，这意味着票价上涨可能是由于竞争减少。这些发现说明了一种情况，即为纠正一个市场失灵而实施的政策，