Our purpose in this paper is to develop and estimate a model of the US automobile industry that can be used to analyze the secular and cyclical strategic markup behavior and market structure of its three major domestic producers - - GM, Ford and Chrysler. The principal novelty in this paper is...

This article analyzes the structure of costs, technology, and productivity in the U.S. automobile industry by estimating a general hedonic joint cost function for domestic automotive production for the Big Three American automobile producers: General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. In general it is...

This article considers whether equitable rates to captive coal shippers are compatible with competitive rates of return in the rail industry. Using the results of a translog cost function based on panel data of Class I railroads for 1974-1986, I show that returns to scale are sufficiently large...

This paper reports on results obtained from the estimation of a rail cost function using a pooled-time series, cross section of Class I railroads for the period 1974-1986. An analysis is performed of short-run and long-run returns to scale, the extent of capital disequilibrium, and adjustments...

We have used a proprietary data set of newly hired semi-skilled production workers at one location of a large unionized firm to investigate several issues in labor economics. This data set is unique in several respects: the workers in our sample faced the same wage schedules, had the same...

The success of deregulation in creating a viable private rail freight system in the ?U.S. since 1979 is relatively undisputed. Deregulation has proceeded in three ways: (i) eased rate setting restrictions; (ii) simplified merger applications and approval procedures; and (iii) relaxed route...

Duopoly is modeled here as a prisoner's dilemma repeated in continuous time. Firms wish to maximize discounted flows of dividend payments, which are paid when capitalization levels permit. A firm is ruined when its capitalization falls below zero, but each ruined firm is immediately replaced by...

This paper develops an econometric model of the effects of R&D effort on the magnitude and characteristics of technical change in the Bell system. We estimate simultaneously a vintage capital production function, embodying several distinct types of capital, and various factor demand functions...