A Continuum Model for Housing Allocation and Transportation Emission Problems in a Polycentric City

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Vertical Integration and Firm Boundaries : The Evidence

Understanding what determines firm boundaries and the choice between interacting in a firm or a market is not only the fundamental concern of the theory of the firm, but it is also one of the most important issues in economics. Data on value added, for example, reveal that in the US, transactions that occur in firms are roughly equal in value to those that occur in markets. The economics profession, however, has devoted much more attention to the workings of markets than to the study of firms, and even less attention to the interface between the two. Nevertheless, since Coase’s (1937) seminal paper on the subject, a rich set of theories has been developed that deal with firm boundaries in vertical or input/output structures. Furthermore, in the last 25 years, empirical evidence that can shed light on those theories has been accumulating.Vertical integration ; firm boundaries ; vertical mergers ; firms versus markets

Essays on airport and airway congestion

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 163-166).Runway and airspace congestion are the primary causes of flight delays in the US. These delays cost airlines and airline customers billions of dollars per year. This thesis consists of two essays. The first essay focuses on several of the commonly proposed market-based solutions to airport congestion. Most of the literature on these market-based solutions has assumed that these remedies are justified by welfare economics, but there is relatively little focus on these justifications. We explore the economic arguments for and against using various market-based approaches to treating airport congestion. The second essay examines the relationship between aviation infrastructure pricing and congestion. Aviation taxes (and some airport fees) are currently designed to tax large aircraft more than small aircraft and flights with more passengers more than flights with few passengers. Several authors have argued that these taxes and fees create an incentive system for airlines to use small aircraft with high frequency, which exacerbates the congestion problem. We study this effect by developing a game theoretic model of airline behavior.(cont.) Using this model, we are able to find a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium behavior for any given set of taxes and fees. These equilibrium results allow us to directly test the potential effects of changing the fees and taxes. We propose an alternative system of taxes and airport fees that charges all similar flights equally, regardless of size, revenue, or the number of passengers. We find that adopting these "flat" taxes and landing fees - i.e. aircraft of all sizes pay equal amounts - would have substantial benefits. The model predicts that the change would reduce congestion levels while making air travel more affordable.by Raphael A. Schorr.Ph.D

Asymmetric industry structures: Multiple technologies, firm dynamics and profitability.

The origins of asymmetric firm sizes are analyzed in the first part of this thesis, modelling technology choice in a one shot quantity game with homogeneous goods. For certain sizes of the market more than one technology is chosen in equilibrium. Generally, the larger the market, the higher the fixed cost of the technology that is chosen in equilibrium. The trade off between market size and concentration is non-monotonic, even if for any size of the market only the most fragmented market structure is considered. In the second part consequences of asymmetric firm sizes are investigated. In Chapter 3 firm dynamics in the chemical sector are examined, distinguishing between the dynamics of scale and scope. The production capacity of firms in homogeneous bulk chemical markets converges in size on a market by market basis, resulting in a fragmented industry structure on a disaggregated level. However, the number of products chemical corporations produce within a category of (synthetic organic) chemicals diverges, leading to a more concentrated industry structure on higher levels of aggregation. These counteracting forces can potentially explain the persistence of concentration that has been observed in fast growing chemical markets. In Chapter 4 it is shown that if the observed asymmetry between firms is consistent with a (subgame-perfect) equilibrium of some single or multi-stage game, bounds exist that restrict the degree of asymmetry between the firms' profitability. Their shape is determined by industry factors. In particular, a higher sensitivity of a firm's profitability on its competitor's action rotates the bounds on the profitability-size trade off anti-clockwise. This is tested for homogeneous goods industries using a panel from the FTC Line of Business Data. Allowing for firm specific fixed effects, some strong empirical support is found