Telecommuting means that employees work completely or sometime at home or at remote telecommuting centres instead of daily travel to work at regular offices. Impacts of telecommuting on transport are becoming significant. This paper reviews the growth of telecommuting and analyzes the necessity to evaluate the influence of telecommuting in transport planning and control. The transport network e...

This article compares the distortions associated with alternative intergovernmental allocation rules when a central authority provides inputs for the provision of social services by local governments, as well as when local governments differ in their needs. Under a quantity-based mechanism, the input choices of high-need localities will tend to be distorted downward. To convince the center of t...

We wish to thank the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange for providing us the data. We thank Yakov Amihud, Eugene Kandel and Orly Sade for very useful comments and suggestions. Wohl thanks the David Orgler and Family Research Fund for Banking and Finance for partial financial support. 2 Abstract In this first direct test of Hellwig's (1980) Noisy Rational Expectations Equilibrium (NREE), we restate the mod...

We study the wage structure during economic transition in the context of Chinese cities and examine the effect of China’s urban housing reforms on the urban wage structure (1988-2005). We find that these reforms, which untied access to housing from state-sector employment, shifted approximately 17% of the labor force from the state sector to the private sector, increasing the private sector lab...

We examine competition in the hospital industry, in particular the effect of ownership type (for-profit, not-for-profit, government). We estimate a structural model of demand and pricing in the hospital industry in California, then use the estimates to simulate the effect of a merger. California hospitals in 1995 face an average price elasticity of demand of -4.85. Not-for-profit hospitals face...

It is often alleged that high auction prices inhibit build-out. We investigate this claim under the extreme case of budget-constrained bidders. Low prices maximize overall the gains from trade. If there are n licenses, the price where the budget constraint just binds maximizes consumer surplus if the elasticity of demand is less than one plus 1/n. If demand is elastic, auctions maximize consume...

We develop a competition index for differentiated products oligopoly and apply it to assessing the impact of concentration on price in hospital markets in California. Our index, which we term LOCI, is bounded between zero and one and increases with the competitiveness of a market. We use 1992-1995 hospital data from California to estimate the impact of concentration on price using our new conce...

The Elasticity of Labor Demand and the Optimal Minimum Wage Contrary to widespread belief, we show that low-pay workers might not generally prefer that the minimum wage rate be increased to a level where the labor demand is unitary elastic. Rather, there exists a critical value of elasticity of labor demand such that increases in the minimum wage rate make low-pay workers better off for higher ...

The objective of this article is to estimate the derived demand for imported cheese products into Japan when cheese import data are disaggregated by specific cheese group and by source country of production+We provide empirical measures of the sensitivity of demand to changes in total imports, own-price, and cross-prices among exporting countries for four market segments of the cheese category+...