Many consumers are keenly aware of gasoline prices, and consumer responses to gasoline prices have been well studied. In this paper, by contrast, we investigate how gasoline prices affect the automobile industry: manufacturers and dealerships. We estimate how changes in gasoline prices affect...

Empirical exercises in economics frequently involve estimation of highly nonlinear models. The criterion function may not be globally concave or convex and exhibit many local extrema. Choosing among these local extrema is non-trivial for a variety of reasons. In this paper, we analyze the...

Incompatibility in market with network effects reduces consumers' ability to "mix and match" components offered by different sellers, but can also spur changes in product attributes that might benefit consumers. In this paper, we estimate the effects of incompatibility on consumers in a classic...

We test whether firms use incompatibility strategically, using data from ATM markets. High ATM fees degrade the value of competitors' deposit accounts, and can in principle serve as a mechanism for siphoning depositors away from competitors or for creating deposit account differentiation. Our...

We analyze tacit collusion in an industry characterized by cyclical demand and long-run scale decisions; firms face deterministic demand cycles and choose capacity levels prior to competing in prices. Our focus is on the nature of prices. We find that two types of price wars may exist. In one,...

Incompatibility in markets with indirect network effects can affect prices if consumers value "mix and match" combinations of complementary network components. In this paper, we examine the effects of incompatibility using data from a classic market with indirect network effects: Automated...

Estimating market power is often complicated by the lack of reliable measures of marginal cost. Instead, policy-makers often rely on other summary statistics of the market, thought to be correlated with price cost margins---such as concentration ratios or the HHI. In many industries, these...

Considerable effort has been devoted in recent years to the description of wage structure. This research has documented a rising return to education, unobserved skill, and work experience, but there is little research into causes of the change in structure. This paper seeks to fill the gap by...

This paper presents new evidence on research and teaching productivity in universities using a panel of 102 top U.S. schools during 1981-1999. Faculty employment grows at 0.6 percent per year, compared with growth of 4.9 percent in industrial researchers. Productivity growth per researcher is...

This paper describes flows of basic research through the U.S. economy and explores their implications for scientific output at the industry and field level. The time period is the late 20th century. This paper differs from others in its use of measures of science rather than technology. Together...