Leonhard Miksch (1901–1950)

A bstract    German economist Leonhard Miksch's ideas on ordoliberalism have so far received little attention in the history of economic thought. This is surprising, as Miksch provides insights into the debates within the so-called "Freiburg School of Law and Economics" in its early phase and, moreover, gave impulses that were essential to the further development of this economic approach. In addition, as a close advisor to Ludwig Erhard, the "political father" of the German "Social Market Economy," his influence on German postwar economic policy was considerable.     

The Emerging Position of the Internet as an Advertising Medium

This paper examines the emerging position of the Internet as an advertising medium. The nature and time path of its evolution is subject to considerable uncertainty arising from issues relating to expansion of the Internet's penetration of households; consumer demand for information; development of pricing policies and measurement capabilities; and its attractiveness to advertisers in different product/service categories. Our analyses of these issues suggest that its long-term impact on intermedia rivalry will be broad and substantial. The Internet is emerging as an adaptive, hybrid medium with respect to the factors hypothesized to affect intermedia substitutability, namely, audience addressability, audience control, and contractual flexibility. Possessing such capabilities, it looms as a potential substitute or complement for all of the major categories of existing media and appears capable of serving a wide range of communications objectives for a broad array of advertisers.     

Deregulation, Mergers, and Cost Savingsin Class I U.S. Railroads, 1974-1986

In this paper we attempt to disentangle the effects of deregulation on rail costs from those directly attributable to mergers. We estimate that cost reductions obtained from mergers ranged from a high of 33% for the Burlington Northern to a low of a 3% cost increase for the CSX. However, firms not engaged in significant merger activities experienced similar cost differentials indicating that consolidation was not a prerequisite for cost savings. We conclude that although mergers did confer some benefits on the participating firms, they were not a prerequisite for railroads being able to achieve substantial cost savings.     

Faster,smaller, cheaper: an hedonic price analysis of PDAs

We compute quality-adjusted price indexes for personal digital assistants (PDAs) for the period 1999 to 2004. Hedonic regressions indicate that prices are related to processor generation and clock speed, memory capacity, screen size and quality and the presence of a digital camera or wireless capability. A particularly salient feature of PDAs is portability, where we find: (i) purchasers value the energy density of the battery technology (e.g. lithium ion) rather than the battery life in hours; and (ii) the physical characteristics of the PDA (e.g. weight, volume) are nonlinearly related to price, suggesting that valuation of the physical form of PDAs does not bear a simple linear relationship to characteristics, either in absolute terms (‘smaller is better’) or vs. an ergonomic ‘sweet spot’. Rather, portability characteristics are correlated with other desirable attributes, making the relationship between price and portability difficult to disentangle. However, hedonic price indexes are robust across different measures of the portability of PDAs. Hedonic indexes using the dummy variable, characteristics prices, and imputation approaches decline on average between 19 and 26% per year. A matched model price index computed from a subset of observations declines at 19% per year, while a fixed-effects hedonic index declines at 14% per year.     

II. Allgemeine und angewandte statistik

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Cost effects of mergers and deregulation in the U.S. Rail industry

We attempt to disentangle the effects of deregulation on rail costs from those directly attributable to mergers and acquisitions, employing a translog variable cost function, based on an unbalanced panel data set of annual observations for major U.S. Class I railroads from 1974 to 1986. We find that both deregulation and mergers contributed significantly to cost savings. However, of the accumulated cost savings achieved by the six major firms involved in mergers postderegulation, we estimate that by 1986 about 91% of the reduction in accumulated costs is due to deregulation, and about 9% is directly due to mergers and acquisitions (which in turn were facilitated by regulatory reforms).     

How Subprime Borrowers and Mortgage Brokers Shared the Pie

We develop an equilibrium model for origination fees charged by mortgage brokers and show how the equilibrium fee distribution depends on borrowers' valuation for their loans and their information about fees. We use noncrossing quantile regressions and data from a large subprime lender to estimate conditional fee distributions. Given the fee distribution, we identify the distributions of borrower valuations and informedness. The level of informedness is higher for larger loans and in better educated neighborhoods. We quantify the fraction of the surplus from the mortgage that goes to the broker, and how it decreases as the borrower becomes more informed.