Using a new and unique data set, this paper applies a systems approach to the study of potential competition, prices, and entry relations in airline city-pair markets. Consistent with limit pricing models, future entry is directly influenced by current prices. Current prices thus appear to provide an important signal to potential entrants about the probability of profitable entry. While results indicate the existence of barriers to entry, these barriers appear to have no independent effects on price beyond there effect on actual competition through increases in concentration.

Predictions of economic theory for the equilibrium condition of workers in three labor markets with differing working hours constraints are tested. Original data allow the marginal rate of substitution of income for leisure to be estimated directly. In two markets, working hours constraints resulting from high fixed employment costs and the overtime premium, respectively, cause workers to desire fewer and more hours. In the third market (agricultural labor), constraint factors are absent. The predicted relationship between the wage and the marginal rate of substitution of income for leisure holds in each case. Implications for agency and human capital models are investigated. Additionally, in the agricultural case, preferences and equilibria are indistinguishable for legal and illegal workers.

The purpose of this paper is to construct a leading index for the United States by deriving a set of weights based on Kalman filters. The weights have certain optimality properties and are related to the existing weighting methods of A. F. Burns and W. C. Mitchell (1946), S. H. Hymans (1973), and A. J. Auerbach (1982). The Kalman filter leading index is compared with the CIBCR leading composite index and an index suggested by Auerbach by subjecting all indexes to a number of tests. The results of the tests are mixed, but suggest that the use of Kalman filters as a way of constructing leading indexes is encouraging.

This study tests the hypothesis that price expectations differ across individuals because they acquire different information about inflation. If price information is a normal good, then the amount of price information acquired will vary across individuals according to income, education, and other demand-specific variables, causing price expectations to be heteroscedastic with respect to these variables. Utilizing monthly household survey data, the authors test the heteroscedasticity hypothesis and find support for the differential information model. In addition, they develop a novel method of incorporating the "don't know" response to questions about inflation into the estimation of price expectations.