This paper studies federal auctions for wildcat leases on the Outer Continental Shelf from 1954 to 1970. These are leases where bidders privately acquire (at some cost) noisy, but equally informative, signals about the amount of oil and gas that may be present. We develop a test of equilibrium...

This paper documents exploratory drilling activity on offshore wildcat oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico that were sold between 1954 and 1990, with emphasis on the period before 1980. For each year of the lease, we study the determinants of the decision whether or not to begin exploratory...

This paper describes the U.S. offshore oil and gas lease sales, conducted by the Department of the Interior since 1954. Several decision problems are discussed, including bidding for leases, the government's decision whether to accept the highest bid, the incidence and timing of exploratory...

We simultaneously assess the contributions to productivity of three sources of research and development spillovers: geographic, technology and product-market proximity. To do this, we construct a new measure of geographic proximity that is based on the distribution of a firm's inventor locations...

We propose a conformant likelihood estimator with exogeneity restrictions (CLEER) for random coefficients discrete choice demand models that is applicable in a broad range of data settings. It combines the likelihoods of two mixed logit estimators--one for consumer level data, and one for...

Economic theory suggests that decentralized markets can achieve efficient outcomes if buyers and sellers have many opportunities to trade. We examine this idea empirically by developing a tractable dynamic model of bidding in an overlapping, sequential auction environment and estimating the...

The consumption value of a durable good diminishes as it ages due to physical deterioration and consumers' preference for the new. We develop a model of consumer specialization and trade in the market for used durables based on imperfect substitutability. Imperfect substitutability across...

We examine the institutional details of the school milk procurement process, bidding data, statements of dairy executives, and supply characteristics in Ohio during the 1980's. We compare the bidding behavior of a group of firms to a control group. We find that the behavior of each of the firms...

This paper examines bidding in auctions for state highway construction contracts on Long Island in the early 1980s, in order to determine whether bid rigging occurred. Detection of collusion is possible because of limited participation in the collusive scheme. The paper looks at differences in...