American Portland cement rose spectacularly during the 1890s from being a niche product to dominating a much larger market. The contributions of innovations, factor endowments and public science—factors highlighted as contributing to the more general American industrialization occurring at the...

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...

Wright (1990) argues the origins of American industrial success are in the institutions that enabled exploitation of natural resources. These institutions, argue David and Wright (1997), included the state and US geological surveys and universities that worked closely with industry. However,...

Is there any glue that may tie together the future of US unionism and the trend towards disintegration of the firm? This paper addresses this question by investigating the effect of outsourcing on US unionisation. Using a new dataset for the US manufacturing sector from 1973 to 1994, we quantify...

This paper specifies a vertically differentiated products model for a product with a discrete/continuous choice. The model is easily estimated with the relatively limited data used in classical demand equation estimation, supplemented by readily available market characteristics data. The model,...

How do globalization economic conditions affect labour market institutions such as unionism? We draw on recent theoretical and empirical work to yield a more comprehensive set of hypotheses related to the decline in unionisation. Furthermore, we extend recent theoretical work to highlight a...

Casual empiricism suggests higher quality is associated with greater variety. However, recent theoretical and empirical research has either not considered this link, or has been unable to establish unambiguous predictions about the relationship between quality and variety. In this paper we...

The effect of unionisation on productivity is an unresolved empirical question. Many studies have found a range of results. Unlike nearly all preceding studies, this study is based on a sharply defined natural experiment which is provided by the Australian Workplace Relations Act 1996. This Act...

Flexibility is of great interest to policy makers and in the popular policy debate, unions are believed to be a main impediment to achieving it. However, these beliefs are not based on firm empirical foundations. Using a new dataset on U.S. three digit manufacturing industries from 1971 - 1994,...

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,...