The contributions of innovations, factor endowments and institutions to American industrialization are examined through analysing the rise of the American portland cement industry. Minerals abundance contributed in multiple ways to the spectacular rise of the industry from the 1890s. However,...

Unobserved plant level heterogeneity and discrete production processes can produce problems for estimation. A structural model of discrete production decisions by heterogeneous plants is constructed and, as a case study, estimated for the U.S. Portland cement industry. A new estimator is...

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...

Both the theory and practice of using hedonic regressions to remove quality effects in price indexes are implicitly developed for monopolistic competitive markets. In this paper, we theoretically and practically analyse the application of a standard hedonic regression for an oligopoly. In the...

Both the theory and practice of using hedonic regressions to quality adjust inflation estimates are implicitly developed for monopolistic competitive markets. We demonstrate conditions required for consistent OLS estimation of hedonic regression for an oligopoly. To reflect firm heterogeneity,...