The collapse of the clearinghouse for the entry-level gastroenterology labor market offers a unique opportunity to study how stable clearinghouses succeed and fail. To explore the reasons for the failure of the clearinghouse (and why failures of this kind of clearinghouse have been so rare), we...

This paper characterizes the effects of market size on the size distribution of establishments for thirteen retail trade industries across 225 U.S. cities. In nearly every industry we examine, establishments are larger in larger cities, and in four industries the dispersion of establishment...

We assess substitutable and complementary relationships among eight national advertising media classes, as well as the magnitude of their own-price elasticities. We use a translog demand model, whose parameters we estimate by three-stage least squares, based on 1960-94 annual U.S. data.We find...

Theory predicts that in markets with increasing returns, the number of differentiated products and resulting consumer satisfaction grow in market size. We document this phenomenon across 246 US radio markets. By a mechanism that we term 'preference externalities', an increase in the size of the...

Leasing contracts specify a rental rate and an option price at which the used good can be bought at the termination of the lease. This option price cannot be controlled when the car is sold. We show that in a world with symmetric information this additional control variable is useless;...

In this paper, I examine the relationship between increasing returns to scale and the geographic concentration of economic activity. Using data on U.S. counties, I estimate the structural parameters of the Krugman (1991) model of economic geography. The specification I use, which is derived from...

This paper develops an approach to measuring the intensity of competition in international markets. The method measures the degree of 'outside' competition faced by exporters located in one source country from firms located outside the source country. We use the elasticity of price and quantity...

This report describes an easily computable model of the relation between cigarette prices and cigarette consumption in the United States. The model is used to predict the revenue impacts of Federal excise tax hikes ranging from $0.45 to $1.76 per pack

In this paper, we develop and estimate a model of commercial smuggling in which some, but not all, firms smuggle a portion of the cigarettes they sell. The model is used to examine the effects on interstate cigarette smuggling of the Contraband Cigarette Act and a change in the federal excise...

We examine how market structure and enforcement affect smuggling and welfare in a model where smuggling is camouflaged by legal sales. Conditions are given for when some, but not necessarily all, firms smuggle. With camouflaging, the market price is below the price when all sales are legal, so...