Ashland University has a retention problem similar to that of many other colleges and universities.This paper estimates a retention model for Ashland that uses not only the variables found in earlier works but also sociological factors that have not been used previously.It confirms the conventional wisdom for some variables but not for others.Students with higher secondary school grades are more likely to graduate from Ashland University, but ACT test scores have a very weak curvilinear relationship with retention.Variables such as economic status, parental education, and family structure have the expected positive results.In contrast, student work experience in high school has an unexpected but not statistically significant negative effect.

A reduced-form model of GDP per capita is estimated using the classical econometric method and two Bayesian techniques, Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA) and Bayesian Analysis of Classical Estimation (BACE) for the two millenniums. For several variables, such as the impact of colonialism, the Goldstone hypothesis of efflorescence increasing economic growth, and the impact of technology, this paper lends support, especially when the Bayesian methods are applied. Other results are mixed. Generally, the results support use of Bayesian methods by eliminating hypotheses that are not consistently supported over all models.

In this paper, a model is developed to estimate the impact of conquering and colonizing other countries on the per capita income of the mother or metropole country. The estimated impacts of the model are positive and quite large, the increases running between 14.2 and 78.3 percent of the total average income. While the omission of certain variables could have biased the results, the employment of Bayesian techniques indicates that the results are insensitive to the use of a large number of model specifications.

In the period from 1920 to 1972, the American steel industry consisted of eight large companies and a fringe composed of small domestic producers and foreign firms exporting to the United States. The market structure made it unlikely that the industry behaved in a perfectly competitive fashion. Thus, oligopoly hypotheses on firm behavior such as Nash-Bertrand and Stackelberg leadership seem plausible. This paper estimates a BLP demand model for the industry, and it, then, uses the demand parameters to estimate price equations under the different behavioral assumptions. From the information in this model, tests are made to see which hypothesis is most consistent with the data. Preliminary results indicate that two sequences are the most consistent with data: one with U.S. Steel switching from Stackelberg leadership to Nash-Bertrand behavior in the early 1930s and the other with the switch being made in 1948. Both of these findings give credence to the profit harvesting theory of George Stigler.

The bankruptcies resulting from the American steel industry downturn in the period, 1999–2002, raise the question of whether the bankruptcy process itself led to permanent plant shutdowns and job losses. With information on 110 of the steel plants operating in the United States in 1994, this paper develops empirical models of steel plant closure and firm bankruptcy to see if the latter impacts on the former. Based on survival models, the results provide support for the hypothesis that the bankruptcy of steel companies could have led to viable steel plants closing, and thus, the bankruptcies in themselves may have caused permanent inefficient employment loss.

This is the first book to provide a systematic treatment of the economics of antitrust (or competition policy) in a global context. It draws on the literature of industrial organisation and on original analyses to deal with such important issues as cartels, joint-ventures, mergers, vertical contracts, predatory pricing, exclusionary practices, and price discrimination, and to formulate policy implications on these issues. The interaction between theory and practice is one of the main features of the book, which contains frequent references to competition policy cases and a few fully developed case studies. The treatment is written to appeal to practitioners and students, to lawyers and economists. It is not only a textbook in economics for first year graduate or advanced undergraduate courses, but also a book for all those who wish to understand competition issues in a clear and rigorous way. Exercises and some solved problems are provided.

Introduction 2. The Early History: 1830 to 1860 3. The Great Take-Off: 1860 to 1900 4. Growth and Consolidation (Steel 1900-1920) 5. The Twenties 6. The Thirties 7. Steel and World War II 8. The Post-War Period, 1946-1970 9. Troubled Times, 1971-1989 10. Uneasy Stability, 1990-2001 11. Conclusion

This article examines Weyerhaeuser's acquisition of Menasha Corporation's west-coast corrugating medium and corrugated box operations. The Federal Trade Commission challenged the acquisition based on anticompetitive concerns arising from concentration in the corrugating medium market and ignored the potential for efficiencies in corrugated box production due to Weyerhaeuser's increased vertical integration. Our analysis also considers pricing behavior during the "hold-separate" period when the court attempted to maintain the acquired corrugating-medium mill as an "independent" entity. We find that the unfettered acquisition likely led to lower prices, and the hold-separate order may have created agency problems that permitted anticompetitive behavior and prevented efficiencies.

This paper examines the relationships among radio station listenership, the number of program formats, and the number of stations. These relationships are statistically significant and consistent with theory, but the interrelationships are numerically small. The results imply that proposals by the federal Communications Commission and Congress to relax ownership restrictions must induce substantial changes in station numbers in order to noticeably increase programming diversity. Merely modest changes in these numbers will have only small diversity effects. The paper's results also imply that merely mandating the number of formats in a market may not be in the interests of listeners.

The survivor technique is used to examine economies of scale in the U.S. steel industry, and the results are compared to an earlier engineering approach study by Tarr. Specifically, the paper focuses on the conventional fully-integrated steel mill with capacities of over 1 million tons (MT) per year. The results are consistent with Tarr's estimate of a conventional integrated steel mill Minimum Optimal Scale of 6 MT a year.

This paper examines the effects of regulatory barriers to the entry of the interstate long-distance carriers into the intraLATA toll service market. With these barriers, the local telephone companies can charge supracompetitive rates for intraLATA toll calls and use the excess revenues to price local exchange service below cost. We use a reduced form econometric price model to see whether these entry barriers have increased intraLATA toll rates. The results indicate that intraLATA toll rates in states that enjoin all types of long distance carriers from providing intraLATA service are about 7.5 per cent higher than in states that allow some sort of competition. In contrast, only preventing the entry of the largest facilities-based carriers does not affect intraLATA rates.

Using independently derived estimates for the market demand elasticity and firm marginal cost, this paper measures the conjectural variations (cv's) of the eight largest U.S. steel firms for the years 1920 to 1972. Comparisons are then made between the measured cv's and those predicted by certain industry conduct hypotheses. Specifically the hypotheses are those for competitive behavior, Cournot behavior, imperfect collusion, and industry profit maximization (perfect collusion). One of the two extreme theories of firm behavior, industry profit maximization, is rejected, but the acceptance or rejection of the other theories depends on the assumptions made about the cost structure of the sample firms.

Federal and state regulatory agencies have traditionally used rate-of-return regulation to set profit and rate levels for utilities. A price cap framework, in which the regulatory agency sets a maximum rate below which the regulated utility has pricing flexibility, is possibly a more efficient alternative to rate-of-return regulation. This article presents an econometric analysis that compares AT&T's prices of intrastate, long-distance telephone service in states that allow AT&T pricing flexibility with those in states that do not. The results of this analysis suggest that AT&T's daytime, evening, nighttime, and weekend rates are significantly lower in states that allow pricing flexibility than in states that use rate-of-return regulation.