This paper focuses on how changes in the economic and regulatory environment have affected production costs and product characteristics in the automobile industry. We estimate cost functions characteristics. Then we examine how this cost surface has changed over time and how these changes relate...

We investigate how the contractibility of actions affecting the value of an asset affects asset ownership. We examine this by testing how on-board computer (OBC) adoption affects truck ownership. We develop and test the proposition that adoption should lead to less ownership by drivers,...

We study how changes in energy input costs for U.S. manufacturers affect the relative welfare of manufacturing producers and consumers (i.e., incidence). We also develop a methodology to estimate the incidence of input taxes which accounts for incomplete pass-through, imperfect competition, and...

In this paper the authors examine the effects of publicly financed infrastructure and R&D capitals on the cost structure and productivity performance of twelve two-digit U.S. manufacturing industries. The results suggest that there are significant productive effects from these two types of...

In this paper we present for the first time estimates of cost and efficiency differences between U.S. and Japanese producers based on an econometric cost function methodology rather than the accounting frameworks previously used. We demonstrate that the cost difference estimates for 1979 which...

This paper formulates a multiproduct structural model to examine the evolution of the structure of production and demand and the dynamic interaction between the two in the context of the U.S. telecommunications industry over an extended period, from 1935 to 1987. We estimate the degree of scale...

An examination of data on labor input and the quantity of output reveals that most U.S. industries have marginal costs far below their prices. The corilusion rests on the empirical finding that cyclical variations in labor input are small compared to variations in output. In booms, firms produce...

Recent estimates in standard models of wage determination for both unionization and occupational licensing have shown wage effects that are similar across the two institutions. These cross-sectional estimates use specialized data sets, with small sample sizes, for the period 2006 through 2008....

H. Gregg Lewis' estimates of the relative wage effect of unionism between 1920 and 1958 are routinely cited though they have rarely been subject to scrutiny. This paper extends Lewis' data to 1980 and, in particular, we construct a series on union membership that links up with the data available...

What type of businesses do unions target for organizing? A dynamic model of the union organizing process is constructed to answer this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity, and decides which ones to organize and when. An establishment becomes...