On the basis of anecdotes centered on the alleged "circuitous routing of checks," researchers focusing on the pre-Fed check-clearing system have usually argued that it was inefficient. In this paper we study a 1910 check remittance register from the State National Bank of Bloomington,...

Our study of the Bell System cost function shows that it is possible to reject the hypothesis that AT&T was a natural monopoly. Our study is based on a regression analysis of a translog cost function estimated on 1947--1977 data. Charnes, Cooper, and Sueyoshi (Charnes, A., W. W. Cooper, T....

This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men and the Current Population Survey for 1983 to examine the relationships among wages, firm size, and plant size. We reach three key findings. First, plant size has little independent effect on wages once we have controlled...

We apply and extend the cost-based approach to bundling and tying under competition developed in Evans and Salinger (2004a) to over-the-counter pain relievers and cold medicines. We document that consumers pay much less for tablets with multiple ingredients than they would to buy tablets with...

We apply and extend the cost-based approach to bundling and tying under competition developed in Evans and Salinger (2004) to over-the-counter pain relievers and cold medicines. We document that consumers pay much less for tablets with multiple ingredients than they would if they bought tablets...

Software platforms are the invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past quarter century. They power everything from mobile phones and automobile navigation systems to search engines and web portals. They have been the source of enormous...

Competition in many important industries centers on investment in intellectual property. Firms engage in dynamic, Schumpeterian competition for the market, through sequential winner-take-all races to produce drastic innovations, rather than through static price/output competition in the market....

Software platforms are a critical component of the computer systems underpinning leading– edge products ranging from third– generation mobile phones to video games. After describing some key economic features of computer systems and software platforms, the paper presents case studies of...