Airline service quality and economic factors: An ARDL approach on US airlines

Abstract

This study examines the impact of interest rates, fuel prices, and market concentration on airline service performance. Rather than focusing on an airline-level analysis, we employ aggregated data from the US Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Airline Consumer Report (ACR) to explore four airline service performance metrics, namely: on-time performance, cancelled flights, mishandled baggage, and passenger’s complaints. We gauge the long run effect of the variables of interest using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag bound approach. The findings reveal long-term linkages between airline service levels and the variation in interest rates and market concentration providing new evidence on the trade-off relation between financial pressures and service quality and has practical implications for both regulators and airline managers. Our results are robust to business cycle effects including the great recession.