The Australian Parliament has passed legislation compelling tobacco products to be sold in ?plain packaging?. This paper reviews this legislation and its likely effects on prices, market structure in the tobacco industry and on smoking behaviour. Industry changes following two previous sets of...

Input flexibility, as measured by the ability of firms to vary input demand in the face of changes in input prices, is an important dimension of labor market flexibility. Using a new dataset, the authors analyze the impact of unionization on input flexibility in U.S. manufacturing from 1973 to...

Input flexibility, as measured by the ability of firms to vary input demand in the face of changes in input prices, is an important dimension of labor market flexibility. Using a new dataset, the authors analyze the impact of unionization on input flexibility in U.S. manufacturing from 1973 to...

Do unions really impede manufacturers' output flexibility? If so, in what ways? The authors propose a methodology for quantifying George Stigler's concept of output flexibility, and for decomposing the effects of unionization on average cost differences between union and non-union plants. Using...

The question of why more African Americans did not migrate earlier out of the stagnant and repressive South after emancipation remains open. Previous work has highlighted the role of demand and supply conditions. At the time, though, there was much concern about the role of emigrant agents who...

When the well-known BLP model is applied to products with rapid technological changes and declining prices it tends to yield implausible results. A sequence of increasingly sophisticated dynamic demand models, most recently Gowrisankaran and Rysman (2009, hereafter GR), have been developed to...

In this paper we empirically analyse two counterfactual situations facing an anti-trust authority following the merger of two of the largest international cigarette companies. First we estimate a nested logit model of demand for cigarettes. The implied elasticity of demand for smoking and...

The static differentiated product demand model when applied to products with rapid product turnover and declining prices, yields implausible results. One response is to explicitly model the inter-temporal choices of consumers but computational demands require restrictive assumptions on consumer...