A Property Rights Perspective on the Emergence of Publicly Owned Transit Systems in the United States

Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies. Business School. The University of Sydney

A Property Rights Perspective on the Emergence of Publicly Owned Transit Systems in the United States

Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies. Business School. The University of Sydney

Gordon Tullock\u27s Critique of the Common Law

Gordon Tullock, trained in the law at the University of Chicago, was an implacable critic of the common law, which originated in England centuries ago and was transplanted to the United States, Canada, Australia, and other English-speaking nations during colonial times.1 Tullock generally favored legal regimes based on civil law or Roman civil law, the latter being the phrase used by John Henry Merryman and Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo ([1969] 2007) to solve a terminological problem in the comparative legal studies literature.2 Although applications of that regime differ from place to place and have evolved over time (as, of course, has the common law), Tullock\u27s preference is shared by most of the rest of the world, including Europe, many parts of Asia and Africa, all of Latin America, and a few enclaves in the common law world (Louisiana, Quebec, and Puerto Rico) (Merryman and Pérez-Perdomo [1969] 2007, 3).3 The civil-law tradition can eb traced to Rome, Germany, and France; the latter nation\u27s Napoleonic Code of 1804 is its archetype (Merryman and Pérez-Perdomo [1969] 2007, 10).

The Government\u27s War on Mergers: The Fatal Conceit of Antitrust Policy

Antitrust is thought by some to be the bulwark of free enterprise. Without the vigilance of the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, so the argument goes, giant corporations would ruthlessly destroy their smaller rivals and soon raise prices and profits at consumers’ expense. But antitrust has a dark side. Opposition to mergers, though in theory based on worries that competition may be impaired, often in practice comes not from consumers whose interests antitrust is supposed to defend, but from competitors faced with the prospect of a larger, more aggressive rival. Because they respond to the demands of competitors, labor unions, and other well-organized groups having a stake in stopping mergers that promise to increase economic efficiency, the antitrust authorities all too often succeed, not in keeping prices from rising, but in keeping them from falling. The politicization of antitrust is not just a matter of historical curiosity. Politics stalks many of the high-profile cases brought by President Clinton’s trustbusters, including Primestar’s planned purchase of a key satellite slot as well as the mergers proposed between Staples and Office Depot, WorldCom and MCI, and Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. When the antitrust authorities intervene to reshape markets at the behest of competitors, private decisions about how best to organize production are displaced by government decisions. Innovative firms are penalized, scale economies are lost, and competition is thwarted, not enhanced

Redesigning the Commercial Organization of CSX: An Organizational Portfolio Analysis

In 2001, CSX Corporation (CSX) reorganized the structure of its merchandise commercial group from separate groups managing each commodity-based line of business to a more functionally structured organization. The move was intended to provide greater controls and expertise required to compete successfully in a new, post-merger environment. This paper details the former and redesigned organizational structure of CSX’s railroad business. It also describes the study and analytic techniques used to support the change. Organizational Portfolio Analysis is used to examine the interconnections among the external markets and the performance fluctuations of each line of business, in order to better comprehend management's challenges, as well as to examine the internal interconnections among the lines of businesses to distinguish between areas of autonomy and synergy

Antitrust Enforcement in the Obama Adminstration\u27s First Term: A Regulatory Approach

During his presidential campaign, Sen. Barack Obama criticized sharply the lax antitrust law enforcement record of the George W. Bush administration. Subsequently, his first assistant attorney general for antitrust even went so far as to suggest that the Great Recession was, at least in part, caused by federal antitrust policy failures during the previous eight years. This paper sets out to investigate how and in what ways antitrust enforcement has changed since President Obama took office in 2009. We review four recent antitrust cases and the behavioral remedies that were imposed on the defendants in those matters in detail. We find that the Obama administration has been significantly more active in enforcing the antitrust laws with respect to proposed mergers than his two predecessors in the White House had been. In addition, the Federal Trade Commission, together with the Department of Justice, withdrew a thoughtful report on the enforcement of Section 2 of the Sherman Act and issued new merger guidelines and a new merger policy remedy guide, all of which have moved antitrust law enforcement away from traditional structural remedies in favor of very intrusive behavioral remedies in an unprecedented fashion. That policy shift has further transformed antitrust law enforcers into regulatory agencies, a mission for which they are not well-suited, resulting in the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission being more vulnerable to rent seeking

The Naked Emperor: Politics Without Romance in \u3ci\u3eThe Calculus of Consent\u3c/i\u3e

Published more than a half-century ago, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Buchanan and Tullock 1962) is one of a handful of pathbreaking contributions to the then contemporary literatures of economics and political science that launched the public-choice research program and its subfield of constitutional political economy.1 It has remained in print ever since, most readily available nowadays as volume 3 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan (Buchanan and Tullock [1962] 1999) and as volume 2 of The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock (Buchanan and Tullock [1962] 2004).2 The Calculus was one of the main works cited in awarding the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to James McGill Buchanan in 1986

Restructuring a railroad engineering economics model : responding to management needs

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil Engineering, 1989.Includes bibliographical references.by Larry Alan Shughart.M.S

A methodology for the evaluation of competition policy

The paper develops a methodology for the evaluation of competition policy. Based on the existing literature and experiences with policy evaluations in other areas of economic activity, the three-step / nine-building-blocks methodology provides guidance for evaluation projects and also assists in the identification of avenues for further academic research