Detailed notes on weekly meetings of the sugar refining cartel show how communication helps firms collude, and so highlight the deficiencies in the current formal theory of collusion. The Sugar Institute did not fix prices or output. Prices were increased by homogenizing business practices to...

We explore the widespread methodology of using demand information to infer market conduct and unobserved cost components under the hypothesis of static oligopoly behavior. Direct measures of marginal cost and conduct, indicating small market power, serve as benchmarks. The more competitive...

We study entry into the American sugar refining industry before World War I. We show that the price wars following two major entry episodes were predatory. Our proof is twofold: by direct comparison of price to marginal cost, and by construction of predicted competitive price cost margins that...

This paper explores environments in which either the revelation or diffusion of information, or its incorporation into stock prices, is gradual, and develops appropriate estimation techniques. This paper has implications both for event study methodology and for understanding the process by which...

This paper examines United States Steel's acquisition by long-term lease of the iron ore properties of the Great Northern Railway. This 1906 transaction, which significantly increased U.S. Steel's already substantial ore holdings, has been characterized by contemporary observers and modern...

This paper shows that the move to offset printing from letterpress in the U.S. daily newspaper publishing industry was determined, in part, by the structure of the local market. Although in monopoly markets, low circulation papers were quicker to adopt than high circulation papers, the ranking...

Recent research has proposed a pro-cyclical link between sales volume and prices in the real estate market through changes in the equity of existing homeowners. This article uses data from the Boston condominium market to show that owners with high loan-to-value ratios take longer to sell their...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on price stickiness by documenting a high rate of nominal rigidity among apartment rents in the U.S. between 1974-1981. 29 percent of units had no change in nominal rent from year to year. Nominal rigidity was much higher among units whose...

Data from downtown Boston in the 1990s show that loss aversion determines seller behavior in the housing market. Condominium owners subject to nominal losses 1) set higher asking prices of 25-35 percent of the difference between the property's expected selling price and their original purchase...

This paper reports on the results of an auction sale of 83 condominium apartment units in New Jersey. At the auction every unit was hammered down, but, unknown to the 2,348 registered bidders, 40% of the sales fell through. Prices in the subsequent sale of condominium units in face to face...