In many sectors of the economy, governments either provide various services at no cost or at highly subsidized prices. Examples are the health, education and general government sectors. The paper analyzes three possible general methods to measure the price and quantity of nonmarket government...

Economists sometimes decry the persistence with which firms set prices above marginal cost and thus, according to the economists, fail to maximize profits. But it is the economists who have it wrong – first, because variable accounting costs are not always a good proxy for marginal economic...

In many sectors of the economy, governments either provide various services at no cost or at highly subsidized prices. Examples are the health, education and general government sectors. The System of National Accounts 1993 recommends valuing these nonmarket outputs at their costs of production...

This paper estimates the price-marginal cost markup for US manufacturing using a new methodology. Most existing techniques of estimating the markup are a variant on Hall's (1988) framework involving the manipulation of the Solow Residual. However this paper argues that this notion is based on...

Economic theory advocates marginal cost pricing for efficient utilisation of transport infrastructure. A growing body of literature has emerged on the issue of marginal infrastructure wear and tear costs, but the majority of the work is focused on costs for infrastructure maintenance. Railway...

Unobserved plant level heterogeneity and discrete production processes can produce problems for estimation. A structural model of discrete production decisions by heterogeneous plants is constructed and, as a case study, estimated for the U.S. Portland cement industry. A new estimator is...

This paper examines the relationship between the use of advanced technologies such as ICT, and outcomes such as productivity, the skill mix of the workforce and wages using micro data for the U.S. and Germany. We find support to the idea that U.S. businesses engage in experimentation in a...