Since its inception, supporters of the Jones Act have claimed that the law is essential to U.S. national security. Although indefensible on economic grounds, Jones Act advocates argue that its restrictions promote the development of both a U.S. merchant marine and shipbuilding and repair...

In policy circles of Washington, DC, in academia, and among advocates and lobbyists, there has been growing attention to the role of antitrust enforcement versus regulation in today’s economy. Various populist arguments seek an expanded role for antitrust law, as proponents seek to control the...

A new data set facilitates study of learning spillovers in World War II shipbuilding. Our results contain two principal but contrasting themes. First, learning spillovers were a significant source of productivity growth, and may have contributed more than conventional learning effects. Second,...

Tourism today is an activity of substantial economic importance worldwide, and has been for some time. Tourism is also of substantial economic importance in the United States, sufficient to warrant the Bureau of Economic Analysis's establishing special accounts on travel and tourism. In this...

In the century after the Civil War, roughly two-thirds of U.S. dutiable imports were subject to specific duties whose ad valorem equivalent was inversely related to the price level. This paper finds that import price fluctuations easily dominate commercial policies (changes in rates of import...

Using data from U.S. commodity flow survey, we show that the historical Union-Confederacy border lowers contemporaneous trade between U.S. states by about 13%. The finding is robust over econometric models, survey waves, or aggregation levels. Including contemporaneous controls, such as network...

The Producer Price Index (PPI) for the United States suggests that semiconductor prices have barely been falling in recent years, a dramatic contrast from the rapid declines reported from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s. This slowdown in the rate of decline is puzzling in light of evidence that...

In this paper, we analyze a purchase lot-sizing decision that includes transport cost using actual motor carrier freight rates. Lot-sizing models in the literature either estimate motor carrier freight rates with a continuous function or simplify less-than-truckload freight rates unrealistically...

During 2004 and 2005, the United States became the main importer of Uruguayan goods, which was unusual when compared to the recent past. This gave raise to a public debate about the future of commercial (and non-commercial) relationships with this important trade partner. The aim of this paper...

The automobile as a durable consumer good spread in Latin America in the first three decades of the 20th century. The consumption of automobiles in the region was determined by foreign trade, with the exception of some countries which in the 1920s managed to set up automobile assembly plants...