A divisia index of total factor productivity (TFP) growth is calculated for each of 16 regulated local telephone companies operating in Tennessee over the years 1989 through 1993. Year over year changes in TFP, in Tornqvist form, yield a growth in total factor productivity estimate for each...

The U.S. Supreme Court held that litigation for anticompetitive ends (“sham litigation”) must be “baseless” in order to face antitrust liability. The filing of such suits continues apace, as does the legal commentators’ debate, but economic analysis has lagged. Here, a game theoretic...

This paper seeks to shed light on the role of school funding in individual school performance. A unique data set is utilized for the Metropolitan Nashville – Davidson County School District in Tennessee, known colloquially as Metro. In 2005 the Metro school board undertook the task of breaking...

The characteristics of time as a resource are examined in order to seek evidence of these characteristics in fundamental concepts of Economics. A series of thought experiments on time travel demonstrate that a constant irreversible rate of time usage underlies the concepts of opportunity cost,...

The author describes an econometrics capstone course design at a large public university that offers economics degrees in both business (BBA) and liberal arts (BS). The goal of the capstone is to provide a research experience similar to those in the honors college but on the smaller scale of a...

Consumers of higher education face a bewildering array of product and price combinations. We compare U. S. institutions with a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) multi-factor frontier using 2000-2001 data for 1,188 four-year institutions of higher education. The input is net price or tuition, fees,...

In this dissertation, we evaluate the efficiency of electric utilities in the United States since 1997, and determine whether investor owned electric utilities (IOUs) and cooperatives (COOPs) achieve higher cost, technical and allocative efficiency and greater financial performance than publicly...