Search results

At the turn of the 20th-century railroad regulation was hotly debated in the United States. Railways were accused of abusing of their monopolistic position, in particular by discriminating rates. Public opinion’s pressure for tighter regulation led to the 1906 enactment of the Hepburn Act, which strengthened the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission. American economists actively participated in the debate. While most of them sided with the pro-regulation camp, the best economic analysis came from those who used the logic of modern law and economics to demonstrate how most railroads’ practices, including rate discrimination, were simply rational, pro-efficiency behavior. However, as relatively unknown Chicago University economist Hugo R. Meyer would discover, proposing that logic in public events could at that time cost you your academic career.

This study utilizes a different approach to examine the effect of transportation on the average height of people in the postbellum period, simply by modeling the change in the marketable surplus of protein. The results show that railroad development had a positive effect on average height from 1867 to 1887, and after this period, its effect was negligible. This study suggests that the factors with negative effects – such as urbanization, industrialization, and infectious diseases – dominated the positive effects of railroad development leading actual average height to decrease from 1867 to 1887.

With increased crude oil prices, railroad is emerging as a cheaper alternative to trucks and other less fuel efficient modes of transportation. As a result, with increase in crude oil price, while other modes of transportation have suffered economic slump, railroad industry is thriving with every company reporting an increase in revenue and profits. In this study, we analyze the performance of seven North American Class I freight railroads. In this chapter, we illustrate the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA), an operations research technique, to analyze the financial performance of the U.S. railroad industry by benchmarking a set of financial ratios of a firm against its peers. DEA clearly brings out the firms that are operating more efficiently in comparison with other firms in the industry and points out the areas in which poorly performing firms need to improve.

The 1896 presidential election between William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley has new salience in the wake of the 2016 presidential contest. We provide the first systematic analysis of presidential voting in 1896, combining county-level returns with economic, financial, and demographic data. We show that Bryan did well where interest rates were high, railroad penetration was low, and crop prices had declined. We show that further declines in crop prices or increases in interest rates would have been enough to tip the Electoral College in Bryan’s favor. But to change the outcome, the additional changes would have had to be large.

This chapter proposes that corporate lawyers be studied as committed to their clients, asking how they advance exercises of power by those whom they have chosen to represent. Currently, corporate lawyers are studied as independent from their clients, asking how they resist client demands. Such research continues despite repeated findings that corporate lawyers are not independent. This chapter explains the puzzling persistence of independence by cultural understandings of both professionalism and law. It recovers a submerged historic voice in which corporate lawyers are judged by their position in a network of relations. It argues that it was the organization of the corporate law firm as a factory which allowed it to become a professional ideal. Market competition has led corporate law firms to move away from a factory model to one in which commitment to clients, not independence from them, is the organizing principle.