Tariffs and industrialization in late nineteenth century America: the role of scale economies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yeo Joon Yoon
Keyword(s):  
Economies Of Scale ◽  
Returns To Scale ◽  
Scale Economies ◽  
Learning By Doing ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Us ◽  
Manufacturing Growth ◽  
Constant Returns To Scale

Abstract I construct a general equilibrium model with economies of scale and learning-by-doing in manufacturing to quantify the effects of tariff that the US imposed on its manufacturing imports from 1870 to 1913. I find that the tariff positively contributes to US manufacturing growth, but the magnitudes are small. I also show that the cumulative welfare effect of the tariff is positive if there exists enough degree of learning-by-doing, a result contrary to the conventional wisdom that tariffs have welfare-deteriorating effects. The welfare-enhancing effect of the tariff disappears when I use a similarly constructed model, but with constant returns to scale in manufacturing. The result suggests that the assumption about technology is important for the welfare implication of the tariff.

Technical efficiency drivers for the Italian water industry

2010 ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
Tiziana Caliman ◽  
Paolo Nardi
Keyword(s):  
Technical Efficiency ◽  
Business Strategy ◽  
Economies Of Scale ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Returns To Scale ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Parametric Models ◽  
Water Industry ◽  
Component Distribution ◽  
Constant Returns To Scale

The aim of this work is to introduce a first analysis concerning the relevance that ownership and financial structure, but also market dimension and business portfolios, have on the technical efficiency of Italian water utilities. Even though scholars have provided information on the influence of some dimensional or geographical variables, mono-utility character or ownership on efficiency, no paper, to the best of our knowledge, has ever considered the presence of all these hedonic variables as efficiency shifters or drivers. Antonioli and Filippini (2001) have not included ownership; Benvenuti and Gennari (2008) have included ownership and multi-utility strategy, but excluded the geographical dimension; Fabbri and Fraquelli (2000) have not included geographical location, business strategy or ownership; furthermore, most analyses of the Italian water sector have focused on the ATO level (investments, labour costs) and not on utility performances. We have estimated four heteroskedastic stochastic production frontiers: two different parametric models, where the hedonic dummy mono is either in the model as an additional variable or it is used to parameterize the variance of the inefficiency term; two competitive statistical formulations have also been introduced to specify the inefficiency component distribution, that is, the half normal and the exponential distributions. The most important findings of this paper can be summarized as follows. The labour, capital and other input elasticities are always highly significant, positive and quite stable in all the performed models, as expected for a well-behaved production function. The main results show that the mono-business strategy is not efficient; at the same time, operating water and sewerage together implies higher efficiency than water- only management. Theoretically, the population density can have an ambiguous effect on efficiency: on one hand, it could be more expensive to serve dispersed customers, but, on the other, it could generate congestion problems. It could be argued that the second effect prevails, therefore a higher density is accompanied by a higher inef- ficiency. The analysis points out that the variance of the idiosyncratic term is a function of the size of the firm, which is measured as the number of connected properties; the null hypothesis, that the firms use a constant returns-to-scale technology, has also been rejected. Considering the 1994 reform, it is possible to state that the integration of water and sewerage has substantially been positive; at the same time, the economies of scale and the ambiguity of density justify the division into provincial basins. The role of the private sector in the water industry, in agreement with previous literature, has neither a positive nor a negative impact on efficiency and ownership is simply not influent [obviously the quality of service should be considered, although the same indifference seems to emerge (Dore et al., 2001)]. Southern Italy suffers from a higher degree of inefficiency (also recently confirmed by Svimez, 2009), and this is probably the most important issue that has to be dealt with, because of the risks of drought and watering bans in those Regions during summer.

Models of Citizenship

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-129
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Military Service ◽  
College Athletics ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Training Corps

This chapter describes new idealizations of soldiering in the period from the 1880s to the eve of American intervention in World War I. With the encouragement of veterans and their allies, memorials increasingly honored all local soldiers who had served the Union or the Confederacy rather than focusing on those who had died. Memorial halls became facilities for veterans rather than educational buildings. Soldier statues focused on new prototypes: bearers of the US flag, active combatants, and marching campaigners. These warriors embodied enthusiasm for physical culture and ideas about ethnicity and race in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century United States. Reconceptualization of military service as a form of education paralleled the expansion of college athletics and development of the Reserve Officers Training Corps. The Shaw Memorial in Boston, an important artistic depiction of African Americans, was an outstanding exception to this militarism. Monuments that commemorated women tended to narrow their participation in the Civil War into a celebration of motherhood as the ideal social role of women.

scholarly journals Marital Matching, Economies of Scale, and Intrahousehold Allocations

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 (4) ◽  
pp. 823-837
Author(s):  
Laurens Cherchye ◽  
Bram De Rock ◽  
Khushboo Surana ◽  
Frederic Vermeulen
Keyword(s):  
Economies Of Scale ◽  
Panel Study ◽  
Scale Economies ◽  
Preference Heterogeneity ◽  
Income Dynamics ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Preference Information ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Us ◽  
Allocation Patterns

We propose a novel nonparametric method to empirically identify economies of scale in multiperson household consumption. We assume consumption technologies that define the public and private nature of expenditures through Barten scales. Our method (solely) exploits preference information revealed by a cross-section of household observations while accounting for fully unobserved preference heterogeneity. An application to data drawn from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics shows that the method yields informative results on scale economies and intrahousehold allocation patterns. In addition, it allows us to define individual compensation schemes required to preserve the same consumption level in case of marriage dissolution or spousal death.

The evidence on the existence of economies Of scale in local government units

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Primož Pevcin
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Economies Of Scale ◽  
Returns To Scale ◽  
Scale Economies ◽  
Scale Efficiency ◽  
Data Envelopment ◽  
Administrative Costs ◽  
Government Operation ◽  
Major Reform ◽  
Limited Scale

<p>The purpose of this paper is to empirically verify if the possible existence of scale economies actually supports the argument that municipal consolidation is needed in Slovenia. The major reform of local self-government in Slovenia was implemented in 1994, when the transformation of existing 58 »communal« municipalities was envisaged. From 1995 onwards, the number of municipalities increased to the current number of 212 municipalities. Consequently, the necessity to implement structural reforms of local self-government in Slovenia has been stressed. The arguments favoring municipal amalgamations stressed that country has become too fragmented and municipal amalgamation would enable the reduction of (administrative) costs, and increase efficiency as well as quality of services provided, indicating that technical aspects of local government operation are targeted. Following, technical efficiency of Slovenian municipalities is estimated with the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method, in order to determine if (and which) municipalities are experiencing increasing returns to scale (i.e., scale economies). The results indicate that there is important scale efficiency component, and predominantly very small municipalities are experiencing economies of scale, but their number is relatively low. Therefore, one of the classical arguments for municipal amalgamation, achieving economies of scale, can only be applied at a limited scale. This does not imply that more extensive amalgamation is not warranted, but it demands that other arguments justifying municipal amalgamation should be presented.  </p>

scholarly journals Has the US Finance Industry Become Less Efficient? On the Theory and Measurement of Financial Intermediation

2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (4) ◽  
pp. 1408-1438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Philippon
Keyword(s):  
Financial Intermediation ◽  
Returns To Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Quantitative Investigation ◽  
Secular Changes ◽  
Finance Industry ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Constant Returns To Scale

A quantitative investigation of financial intermediation in the United States over the past 130 years yields the following results: (i) the finance industry's share of gross domestic product (GDP) is high in the 1920s, low in the 1960s, and high again after 1980; (ii) most of these variations can be explained by corresponding changes in the quantity of intermediated assets (equity, household and corporate debt, liquidity); (iii) intermediation has constant returns to scale and an annual cost of 1.5–2 percent of intermediated assets; (iv) secular changes in the characteristics of firms and households are quantitatively important. (JEL D24, E44, G21, G32, N22)

W. D. Howells and the Crisis of Overproduction

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-472
Author(s):  
IAN McGUIRE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Us Economy ◽  
The Us ◽  
To Come ◽  
Literary Fame

In October of 1888, at the height of his literary fame and influence, W. D. Howells wrote the following to Edward Everett Hale:I am persuaded also that the best that is in men, most men, cannot come out until they all have a fair chance. I used to think America gave this; now I don't. – I am neither an example nor an incentive meanwhile in my own way of living …Words, words, words! How to make them things, deeds, – you have the secret of that; with me they only breed more words. At present they are running into another novel.Howells's tendency to equate his own weaknesses with the social tensions of late-nineteenth-century America is equally apparent in a letter written a few weeks earlier to Henry James:I'm not in a good humour with “America” myself. It seems to me the most grotesquely illogical thing under the sun…after fifty years of optimistic content with “civilization” and its ability to come out right in the end, I now abhor it and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew upon real equality. Meantime I wear a fur-lined overcoat and live in all the luxury my money can buy. (417)While these letters express, most clearly, a sense of disillusionment, a feeling that Howells like his country has betrayed his early promise, they also manage to imply the more disturbing fear that the promise may actually have been kept – that luxury and meaninglessness may be the logical culmination of both moral projects. There is a feeling here beyond irony (and he was never a great ironist) that Howells, like America, is helpless in the grip of a process which makes vacuousness and luxury the inevitable result of any quest for value. I will argue in this article that one name for this process is capitalist modernity and that the specific moment of capitalist development that Howells is reacting to, in these letters and in his work as a whole, is the crisis of overproduction experienced by the US economy towards the end of the nineteenth century. Howells's uncertainty in these letters, about his own life and writing and about the state of his country, speaks, in this context, to the confusions of a culture in which the morally sanctioned effort of production had become somehow itself a problem, a problem whose solution – consumption – appeared as an immoral, yet inevitable, form of wastage.

A Note on the Relationship among the Shape of the Production Possibility Frontier, ‘Returns to Scale’ and ‘Returns to Factors’ under Cobb–Douglas Production Function

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merter Mert
Keyword(s):  
Production Function ◽  
Economies Of Scale ◽  
Returns To Scale ◽  
Scale Economies ◽  
Production Possibility ◽  
Production Possibility Frontier ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Douglas Production Function

The purpose of this study is to examine relationship among returns to scale, returns to factors and the shape of the production possibility frontier under Cobb–Douglas production function. The study asks the following question: How can production possibility frontier be drawn (a) if returns to scale are constant, increasing and decreasing and (b) if returns to factors are constant, increasing and decreasing? The main finding of the study is as follows: When (a) returns to factors are constant or increasing or decreasing and (b) returns to scale (economies of scale internal to the firm) are constant or increasing or decreasing, the production possibility frontier can be bowed in or bowed out or be linear under certain conditions.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Fawn Chung
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
American West ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Chinese Workers ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Chinese Labor

This book examines the role of the Chinese in the lumber trade in the American West during the late nineteenth century, with a focus on the Sierra Nevada in the 1870s to 1890s. It looks at Chinese laborers' contribution to the building of the American West by analyzing their migration, their communities and lifestyles, lived experiences, transnationalism, and their work in relationship to mining and railroad construction. It also considers the timber barons and companies that employed Chinese workers, their departure from the Sierra Nevada forests, and the anti-Chinese sentiment that they endured. It shows that Chinese immigrants new to North America were first attracted to mining, but they turned to other work, such as logging, when they met with resistance and opposition from miners. The book also challenges some of the popular stereotypes that developed during this period of emerging unionism, along with the assumption of “cheap Chinese labor” that has been used to interpret the Chinese experience in late-nineteenth-century America.

Reading the Market: Abstraction, Personification and the Financial Column of Town Topics Magazine

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 1055-1075 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER KNIGHT
Keyword(s):  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Main Section ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Public Property ◽  
Human Scale ◽  
Market Report ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Financial Capitalism

This article examines the role of the market report as a performative technology that does not merely reflect the emerging world of financial capitalism in late nineteenth-century America but actively shapes it. It takes as its case study the financial pages of Town Topics, the preeminent society gossip magazine in the 1880s and 1890s. Although at first sight the financial section seems far removed from the salacious gossip that the main section of the magazine traded in, there are close connections between the two. An analysis of the rhetoric of the financial pages of Town Topics uncovers a mixture of abstraction and personification in their depictions of market activity. In the same way that the society gossip column in effect created the very possibility of “society” as both exclusive and public property, the genre of the financial page helped create the idea of “the market” as both a human-scale drama and an abstraction that was beyond the control of any individual, or even government.

scholarly journals Concentration in the airline industry: Evidence of economies of scale?

2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahren Johnston ◽  
John Ozment
Keyword(s):  
Airline Industry ◽  
Concentration Ratio ◽  
Economies Of Scale ◽  
Scale Economies ◽  
Early Experience ◽  
Air Transportation ◽  
Industry Output ◽  
The Us ◽  
Reduced Costs ◽  
New Entrants

The early experience of the airline industry under deregulation was very much as expected, with increased competition and new entrants offering highly competitive rates. However, there are approximately 130 airlines operating today, and the industry remains more heavily concentrated than it was prior to deregulation. This study reports on concentration in the US airline industry between 1970 and 2009, as measured by the Hcrfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) and Concentration Ratio, together with changes in industry costs. The results show a trend of industry-wide reduced costs per available seat mile that is negatively correlated with the increased level of industry output over the last 30 years and increased concentration, which demonstrate the need for more research into the question of scale economies in air transportation.

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