The “Names Game”: Harnessing Inventors, Patent Data for Economic Research

This empirical analysis focuses on the impact of the economic cycle on firms' ability to sustain cooperative behavior within an explicit cartel agreement that existed during the interwar period in the Northern French coalfields. The basic model is based on Bresnahan (1982) and adapted to the coal industry. In order to identify the degree of oligopoly, we first assume the independence of marginal cost with respect to the basin's production and second, we study the case of a marginal cost depending on the basin's production.