U.S. Transportation Merger Policy: Evolution, Current Status, and Antitrust Considerations

The structure and behavior of the U.S. surface freight transportation industries are undergoing dramatic change as a result of the decrease in federal government economic regulation of these industries. In particular, legislative and administrative changes in the approach to regulating intramodal and intermodal mergers have helped facilitate a restructuring of the U.S. rail system and the establishment of railroad-owned multimodal transportation firms. Additionally, the exemption of trucking mergers from Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) regulation may lead to larger combinations in that industry

Transportation Labor Relations: Contemporary Developments, Challenges, and Strategies

Historically, labor costs have represented the largest cost component of the transportation industry. The industry is heavily unionized, and transport workers generally receive higher wages than the average industrial worker. Under federal economic regulation, carriers had little incentive to bargain hard to keep labor costs low. Restrictive entry policies and collective ratemaking resulted in near-uniform pricing among competitors. Increased labor costs were merely passed on to the consumers of transport services

Evolution of Motor Carrier Contracting

The relationships between motor carriers and their shippers have hanged a great deal since regulatory reform of the U.S. truck transportation industry began in the late 1970s. Prior to this regulatory change, business activity between carriers and shippers was conducted primarily on a transactional or shipment-to-shipment basis. The operating and pricing freedoms granted to motor carriers along with the development of new technologies and processes, such as electronic data interchange (EDI) and just-in-time (JIT) production and inventory management, have encouraged carriers and shippers to form closer, longer term, and more interdependent relationships. These partnershipping\u27\u27 relationships between carriers and shippers resemble the relationships between shippers and their other service and product vendors that evolved much earlier

Linking Real Time and Location in Scheduling Demand-Responsive Transit

The role of rural demand-responsive transit is changing, and with that change is coming an increasing need for technology. As long as rural transit was limited to a type of social service transportation for a specific set of clients who primarily traveled in groups to common meal sites, work centers for the disabled, or clinics in larger communities, a preset calendar augmented by notes on a yellow legal pad was sufficient to develop schedules. Any individual trips were arranged at least 24 to 48 hours ahead of time and were carefully scheduled the night before in half-hour or twenty-minute windows by a dispatcher who knew every lane in the service area. Since it took hours to build the schedule, any last-minute changes could wreak havoc with the plans and raise the stress level in the dispatch office. Nevertheless, given these parameters, a manual scheduling system worked for a small demand-responsive operation

Highway Performance and Time-Sensitive Industries

Communities and states are using every means available to them to attract and retain economic activity. One such strategy is to plan for the changing needs of new and existing businesses. In the past two decades, firms have come to view time as one of their most precious resources. Some businesses have adopted efficiently timed production methods like just-in-time, in which inventory and safety stock are minimized; deliveries of intermediate goods at all stages of production are synchronized with suppliers so that at no point do products linger. Highway projects that reduce unanticipated delays enhance the ability of time sensitive businesses to maintain closely timed production and sales schedules. Perhaps the most important type of delay in this context is that produced by incidents, which are events that disrupt normal traffic flow. In addition to accidents, incidents include stalled vehicles, debris on the road, or other impediments to orderly flow. While they are rare events, incidents do happen, and they can greatly affect travel times, especially on roads operating at near capacity. Highway improvements can reduce the likelihood of incidents and reduce the severity of impacts when incidents do occur. How to measure increases in highway system performance for time-sensitive businesses when these systems are upgraded is a focus of this monograph. We begin by examining the changes in the business environment that precipitated the movement toward time-sensitive production. Then, from an extensive survey, we conclude that although businesses in Iowa are somewhat less time-sensitive than businesses in many other places, Iowa’s businesses anticipate tighter production schedules in the future. We show how traffic incidents and incident-produced congestion erode highway performance for time-sensitive industries. An analysis of the causes and consequences of incident-produced delays provides the foundation for our model of incident-produced delay, which we have developed to gauge highway performance for time-sensitive firms. This research was a joint effort between researchers at the University of Iowa Public Policy Center and Iowa State University’s Department of Transportation and Logistics. The Iowa Department of Transportation provided funding for this project

Three essays on the influence of formal institutions on entrepreneurship.

This dissertation is composed of three essays in which I examine the influence of formal institutions on entrepreneurs and new firms. In the first essay, The Influence of Institutions on the Likelihood of Self-Employment: A Multilevel Analysis, I examine how institutions at the country-level are related to the likelihood that individuals in those country are self-employed. Country-level measures of formal institutions are paired with individual-level data on self-employment from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (Reynolds et al., 2005). Using the Fraser Institute\u27s Economic Freedom of the World index and the Heritage Foundation\u27s Index of Economic Freedom separately as measures of institutions, I find that sound money in a country is positively associated with individual self-employment with both indices. Property rights and trade freedom are positively related to self-employed using the Economic Freedom of the World index. In the second essay, Labor Market Institutions and New Firm Employment Growth,\u27 I examine how state-level labor market characteristics such as minimum wages, union densities, and unemployment insurance premiums influence employment growth in new firms. I use firm-level data from the Kauffman Firm Survey (DesRoches, Robb, & Mulcahy, 2009), which contains data from several thousand new firms for years 2004-2008. Minimum wages, union densities, and unemployment insurance structure do not predict the level of employment in new firms in the manner hypothesized. In the third essay, The Impact of Taxes and Regulations on New Firm Births and Deaths in State Border Counties, I examine how state-level measures of government size, taxation burdens, unionization levels, and minimum wages influence the birth and death rates of firms in counties located on state borders. Tabulations containing data on establishment births and deaths by U.S. County (Plummer & Headd, 2008) were merged with measures of government size, taxation burdens, union densities, and minimum wages. I find a negative relationship between the overall tax burden and the birth rate of new firms. However, unionization, minimum wages and government size are not related to the birth and death rates of firms in the manner hypothesized

Motor Carrier Scheduling Practices and Their Influence on Driver Fatigue

The primary objective of this report is to develop a better understanding of how the scheduling practices of motor carrier firms affect driver fatigue. The basis of this empirical research is a commercial driver fatigue model that includes driving environment (i.e., regularity of time, trip control, and quality of rest), economic pressures exerted on drivers (from customers, carriers, and the drivers themselves) and company safety practices as key factors in explaining driver fatigue. The model utilizes two measures of fatigue: frequency of close calls due to fatigue and driver perceptions of fatigue as a problem. Crash involvement is used to evaluate general safety performance. Three separate studies were conducted. First, the influence of driving environments alone on fatigue among over-the-road truck drivers was tested through a survey of 502 drivers at five geographically dispersed truck stops. A typology of driving environments was developed and the percent of drivers in each category was determined. It was found that a large number of drivers are in the “high fatigue risk” categories. Regression analysis identified starting the work week tired and longer than expected loading and unloading time as significantly related to both measures of fatigue. Regularity of time, regularity of route, and hours of uninterrupted sleep were each statistically significant factors for one fatigue measure. Next, the complete model was tested on a random sample of 279 drivers at 116 trucking companies and 122 drivers at 66 motor coach companies, which was then stratified on the basis of safety performance (i.e., SAFESTAT ratings). Data for these two studies were generated from surveys of drivers, safety directors, dispatchers, and top management at the sample firms. In the truck company study, starting the workweek tired was the single most significant factor related to fatigue. Other significant fatigue-influencing factors were difficulty in finding a place to rest and shippers’ and receivers’ scheduling requirements (including loading and unloading). Company safety practices that mitigated driver fatigue were carrier assistance with loading and unloading, carrier efforts to minimize nighttime driving, and driver voluntary attendance at corporate safety and training meetings. In the motor coach company study, the most significant factors related to driver fatigue were starting the work week tired, driving tired to make a good income, and pressure on drivers to accept trips. Two safety measures – drivers’ perceptions of their company’s safe drivingculture and policies, or attempts to minimize nighttime driving – mitigated some of the factors that adversely affect driver fatigue

Advanced modeling for end-of-the-roadmap CMOS and potential beyond-CMOS applications

End-of-the-roadmap CMOS devices are explored via particle-based ensemble semi-classical Monte Carlo (MC) methods employing quantum corrections (QCs) to address quantum confinement and degenerate carrier populations. The significance of such QCs is illustrated through simulation of n-channel III-V and Si FinFETs. Original contributions include our treatment of far-from-equilibrium degenerate statistics and QC-based modeling of surface-roughness scattering, as well as considering quantum-confined phonon and ionized-impurity scattering in 3D. Typical MC simulations approximate degenerate carrier populations as Fermi distributions to model the Pauli-blocking (PB) of scattering to occupied final states. To allow for increasingly far-from-equilibrium non-Fermi carrier distributions in ultra-scaled and III-V devices, we instead generate the final-state occupation probabilities used for PB by sampling the local carrier populations as a function of energy and energy valley. This process is aided by the use of fractional carriers or sub-carriers, which minimizes classical carrier-carrier scattering. Quantum confinement effects are addressed through quantum-correction potentials (QCPs) generated from coupled Schrödinger-Poisson solvers, as commonly done. However, we use our valley- and orientation-dependent QCPs not just to redistribute carriers in real space, or even among energy valleys, but also to calculate confinement-dependent phonon, ionized-impurity, and surface-roughness scattering rates. Collectively, these quantum effects can substantially reduce and even eliminate otherwise expected benefits of considered InGaAs FinFETs over otherwise identical Si FinFETs, despite higher thermal velocities in InGaAs. Beyond-CMOS device concepts are also being considered for future applications. Thin-film sub-5 nm magnetic skyrmions constitute an ultimate scaling alternative for beyond-CMOS data storage technologies. These robust non-collinear spin-textures can be moved and manipulated by spin-polarized or non-spin-polarized electrical currents, which is extremely attractive for integration with current memory technologies. An innovative technique to detect isolated nano-skyrmions with a current-perpendicular-to-plane is shown, which has immediate implications for device concepts. Such a mechanism is explored by studying the atomistic electronic structure of the magnetic quasiparticles. The tunneling conductance is quite sensitive to spatial variations in the electronic structure, as a large atomistic conductance anisotropy up to 20 is found for magnetic skyrmions in Pd/Fe/Ir(111) magnetic thin-films. This spin-mixing magnetoresistance effect possibly could be incorporated in future magnetic storage technologies.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Following Intellectual Genealogies: The Construction of Mare Liberum and Mare Clausum, 1603-1652

This thesis traces the early modern intellectual lineages of Mare Liberum, the idea that the ocean should be common to all, and Mare Clausum, the idea that the ocean can be owned. It examines the genesis of Mare Liberum in jurist Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum as well as the genesis of Mare Clausum in eminent and well-developed responses to Grotius: William Welwod’s De Dominio Maris, Serafim de Freitas’s Do Justo Império Asiático dos Portugueses, and John Selden’s Mare Clausum: Of The Dominion, or, Ownership of the Sea. In bringing each theorist into dialogue and debate with the others, this thesis bridges language barriers and demonstrates the importance of understanding each theorist in his context. Ultimately, it argues that the continued existence of Mare Liberum and Mare Clausum as distinct “genealogies” of ideas centered on the fact that Grotius justified Mare Liberum on a philosophical level while jurists like Welwod, de Freitas, and Selden justified Mare Clausum on a practical level. With justifications resting in two separate spheres – one regarding what the nature of the ocean was and one regarding what the state of the ocean ought to have been – Mare Liberum and Mare Clausum were unable to speak discursively to one another. In the early seventeenth century, Mare Clausum and Mare Liberum were ships passing in the night

Predicting Decision-Maker Momentum to Change Offerings in Response to Uncertainty: The Case of the U.S. Customs Mod Act

The major concern of this paper is predicting decision-maker momentum to change product and service offerings in response to significant uncertainties as an antecedent to organizational change. From a survey of organizations in the National Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association of America (NCBFAAj, data were obtained on decision-makers\u27 perceived uncertainties, and intent or momentum to change offerings in response to uncertainty created by the U.S. Customs Modernization and Informed Compliance Act ~f 1993 (Mod Act). Survey measures include uncertainties, organization revenue and age, decision-maker age and experience, technological expertise. formal planning and formalization of procedures. The regression results indicate that organization revenue, decision-maker age and Mod Act uncertainty were associated with the NCBFAA customs brokers\u27 momentum to change offerings in response to Mod Act uncertainty. Because the survey can be adapted for industry-specific uncertainties, we propose the survey. model and its results can be used by decision-makers of organizations within dynamic industries as they seek to realign to a new industry environment