In this paper we study the relationship between costs, input prices and activity levels in a sample of medium sized, city police departments for the years 1968, 69, 71 and 73. Our focus is on determining the functional structure of law enforcement production technology

In this paper we provide suffic ient condi tions, which, when combined with recent developments in the theory of exact aggregation, permit estimation of group specific demand systems when micro-level information is unavailable. We illustrate the approach by estimating group specific cost of...

In this note we correct several misunderstandings which have arisen since publication of our earlier paper “Law Enforcement Agencies as Multiproduct firms: An Econometric Investigation of Production Costs.” These misconceptions arise regularly in empirical applications of economic theory to...

We use a general model to analyze the optimal intertemporal pricing policy for a monopolist when current and past output play a role in determining future cost and/or demand conditions through, "experience," in production and/or in consumption. As would be expected, the optimal price path...

Retail productivity continues to be of significant concern to many organizations across the country. However, the various perspectives in the literature often imply inconsistent definitions and measurementofkey productivity-related concepts. The thrust of this paper is to provide definitional...

It is easy to equate the output of a retail establishment with the value of its sales (e.g., revenue). The simplicity of this approach is clearly the reason that it is so often used. However, we have argued that to do this is conceptually inappropriate because it confuses output and demand two...

Experience curves have for some time provided a conceptual framework for forecasting unit costs of new products or production activities. On a practical level, however, statistical estimation of experience curves involves a number of subtle model specification issues which if ignored can render...

For decades, statistical methods, many based upon the “general linear model,” have been used to do estimation and test hypotheses in the social and natural sciences, in medicine, and in the private sector. These tools have become increasingly sophisticated and are often paired with powerful...

In this paper we construct four rather broad classes of theoretical models of criminal behavior and analyze the properties of each class. Our focus is on the testable hypotheses which arise from each class

In this paper we estimate the demand structure for refined lead over the time 1948-65. Special attention is focused on modeling the technological and institutional lags which prevent price changes from quickly impacting demand