The North Dakota Railroad War of 1905, which pitted a potential entrant (the Soo Line) against an established monopolist incumbent (the Great Northern Railway), offers a lucid empirical example of strategic behavior, and in particular the potential for entry deterrence through product...

Collusion is widely condemned for its negative effects on consumer welfare and market efficiency. In this paper, I show that collusion may also in some cases facilitate the creation of unexpected new sources of value. I bring this possibility into focus through the lens of a historical episode...

We use the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 to study the effect of bankers on corporate boards in facilitating access to external finance. In the early twentieth century, securities underwriters commonly held directorships with American corporations; this was especially true for railroads, which...

A number of formerly regulated multiproduct industries have a transitional or permanent residual regulatory mandate to protect consumers from "excessive" prices. The legislation that deregulated most rail rates contains a statutory mandate for the regulator to protect shippers from "excessive"...

We study the role of distance and time in statistically explaining price dispersion for 14 commodities from 1732 to 1860. The prices are reported for US cities and Swedish market towns, so we can compare international and intranational dispersion. Distance and commodity-specific fixed effects...

We investigate the impact of financial windfalls on household portfolio choices and risk exposure. Exploiting the randomized assignment of lottery prizes in three Swedish lotteries, we find a windfall gain of $100K leads to a 5-percentage-point decrease in the risky share of household...

Using quarterly micro data on capacity utilization among Swedish manufacturing firms, we show that idiosyncratic factors are much more important than aggregate influences in explaining variation in capacity utilization across firms and over time. Idiosyncratic does not mean unpredictable,...