Abstract Retail and wholesale gasoline prices vary over time and across geographic locations due to differences in government policies and other factors that affect demand, costs, and market power. We use a two-equation, reduced-form model to determine the relative importance of these various...

In an attempt to improve the nation's health, many U.S. policy makers have or are considering imposing taxes on the fat in food. Dairy products constitute a large portion of at home fat consumption of particularly harmful types of fat, and nearly all U.S. households consume these products. We...

Although many theoretical industrial organization models are based on the existence of a critical mass of exogenously “brand loyal” consumers, we find little empirical evidence supporting these assumptions in the orange juice retail market. There are very few loyal consumers. More importantly,...

This lecture, PowerPoint slides, and movie provide a relatively non-technical introduction to cartels. After describing the characteristics of cartels predicted by economic theory, the instructor shows a movie of the "secret" meetings of the lysine cartel. This movie demonstrates that an actual...

Using a maximum entropy technique, the authors estimate the market shares of each firm in an industry using the available government summary statistics such as the four-firm concentration ratio and the Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index. They show that their technique is very effective in estimating...

Empirical evidence from agricultural labor markets is consistent with efficiency-wage theory and inconsistent with several alternative explanations. According to this theory, the higher wage or deferred payment (benefits) that direct-hire growers pay relative to that of farm labor contractors is...

Industrial policies that are essentially nonlinear taxes or subsidies on adjustment costs of domestic firms affect those firms' market power in oligopolistic international markets. These adjustment policies often can achieve a strategic purpose at lower cost to the government than linear trade...

The strategic effects of subsidies on output and subsidies on investment differ substantially in dynamic models where a government's commitment ability is limited. Output subsidies remain effective even as the period of commitment vanishes, but investment subsidies may become completely...