Full price competition and Dupuit's defense of the long-and-short-haul “discrimination”

Condemnation of the long-and-short-haul discrimination has been nearly ubiquitous in the literature on economic theory and transportation. However, the French economist Dupuit developed a case against all transport regulation by relating it to a defense of the practice of place discrimination before the middle of the nineteenth century. He did so, moreover, within an early elaboration of a full price explanation of competitive functioning. This paper analyzes the idea in Dupuit's context and argues that this so-called form of price discrimination is actually an efficient and necessary form of the competitive process.     

Nineteenth Century Urban Market Failure?: Chadwick on Funeral Industry Regulation

This essay analyzes the regulatory theory and policy preceptions of Edwin Chadwick (1800-1890), the premier Benthamite utilitarian reformer. We focus on and analyze Chadwicks economic diagnosis of the London funeral market in the first half of the nineteenth century. In his view, externalities and market failure in both the burial and funeral service markets demanded socialization of property rights and implementation of a franchise bidding scheme. Chadwicks rationales for government intervention, including high taxes and information costs—unique, we believe, for his time—provide the basis for numerous forms of contemporary regulations at all levels in the United States today.     

Smokeless tobacco,smoking cessation and harm reduction: an economic analysis

Good estimates place ‘hard core’ smoking rates in the United States at approximately 25%, with little change over the decade of the 1990s. This paper examines the possibilities of ‘harm reduction’ with the use of smokeless tobacco. Specifically, using an econometric model we seek to determine whether an increase in the use of smokeless tobacco would lead to reduced smoking rates in the United States. Applying our model to the NHANES III (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) we find that the use of smokeless tobacco by an average U.S. male smoker would increase the average probability of smoke cessation by over 10%. Approximately 3 million additional ‘quits’ would result for 26 million smokers. Our study permits an examination of cessation by age groups and we find that males who use smokeless tobacco between 16 and 65 have a 10–14% probability of quitting but that the probability falls beyond age 66. Important implications for life extension and health costs would attend these results with, under conservative assumptions, life years saved approximating 2.16 million and health care cost-savings of about $3 billion per year.     

Are Art Auction Estimates Biased?

This article considers whether presale auction estimates are unbiased predictors of price when “no‐sales” are considered utilizing a newly constructed sample of over 500 works by eight early twentieth‐century American artists. Unbiased presale auction estimates in predicting price, while expected, are generally not supported in previous work, but these studies (excepting one) do not include no‐sales in the calculations. In order to study the question, we employ a standard approach that uses an inverse Mills ratio arising from a sample selection probit to correct for selection bias. We find that controlling for selection bias, presale auction estimates appear to be biased downward, and we offer possible reasons for this result.     

Occupational Licensing of a Credence Good: The Regulation of Midwifery

A general theoretical and empirical model of the impact of regulation on supply and demand (prices and quantities) is developed in this paper. The regulation of midwifery services—of certified nurse-tnidwives (CNMs)—relative to obstetricians (OBs) is analyzed within this framework. Demand-side (quality assurance) effects are distinguished from supply-side (Stigler-Peltzman) effects in the model. Since both unambiguously predict a price increase, we focus on the regulatory impact on quantity. We find, within the empirical model, that while both effects are present, supply-restricting effects dominate quality assurance in the U.S. market for CNM services. When mean regulations are compared to minimum regulations in the sample, CNM births increase from just under 6% of all births to a little over 11%. On net, regulation reduces the quantity of CNM births.