Abstract Reviews the book "Dollar-Unit Sampling: A Practical Guide for Auditors," by Donald A. Leslie, Albert D. Teitlebaum and Rodney J. Anderson.

G. S. Maddala, R. Blaine Roberts; Statistical Cost Analysis Re-Revisited, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 February 1981, Pages 177–181

Economists have been paying increasing attention to the study of situations in which csumers face a discrete rather than a continous set of choices.Such models are potentially very important in evaluating the impact of government programs upon consi.mterwelfare.But very little has been said in general regarding the tools of applied welfare economics in discrete choice situations.This paper shows how the conventional methods of applied welfare economics can be modified to handle such cases.It focuses on the cornputation of the excess burden of taxation, and the evaluation of gua].itychange.The results are applied to stochastic utility models, including the popular cases of prohit and logit analysis.Throughout, the ernp)-asis is on providing rigorous guidelines for carrying out applied work.

We estimate substitution possibilities among a set of age-race-sex groups in the labor force. The estimates are based on cross-section data from SMSAs in 1969, and they allow us to consider how substitutable adult women are for young women or young men. The estimates are used, along with assumptions about the extent of wage rigidity and elasticities of labor supply, to simulate the direct and indirect effects of the growth of the female labor force on job opportunities for youth, assuming rigid wages for young workers, and on the wage rates of adult males, assuming these wages are flexible.

HIS paper develops and applies a model for analyzing regulatory change in the freight transportation industry. The model incorporates multiple product markets, multiple transport modes and imperfect competition between the modes. An application of the model to consider some of the consequences of extending the Interstate Commerce Commission's agricultural exemption to the railroads, for the movement of corn in the Midwest, is provided. The analysis has three significant elements. First, we extend the work in Daughety and Inaba (1978a,b) to obtain transport demands that are based on the theory of the firm. The shipper chooses markets to ship to, mode to ship by, as well as output level and amounts to ship. He faces transport modes that are differentiated by service characteristics which are generally stochastic in nature. Analyses of demand for freight transport that have been especially attentive to transport service characteristics and other micro-parameters include Allen (1970), Boyer (1977), Daughety and Inaba (1978a,b) and Levin (1978). While varying in some degree as to form and technique, these studies have all attempted to estimate disaggregate models of shipper behavior. In some cases this behavior was eventually aggregated to some form of market (or industry) demand functions. While such analyses are generally time-consuming and expensive the results have (at least sometimes) been worth the effort, paying off in models of demand that are responsive to important market parameters. Second, we propose a mechanism for constructing equilibria in imperfectly competitive transport markets. The underlying approach is to introduce a coniectural variations narameter that reflects different assumptions about how carriers will react to the actions of competitors. Third, we apply our methods to examine some of the consequences of extending the agricultural exemption (see, e.g., Locklin (1972)) to the railroads. Three market equilibria are computed: A base case wherein rail is regulated and trucks are unregulated and two polar deregulation cases wherein railroads act either competitively or in a coordinated fashion. Data to estimate transport demands were obtained from a survey of country grain elevator operators on shipments of corn originating in the Midwest (Iowa, Illinois and Indiana) and destined for interior, East Coast and Gulf Coast markets. ICC data were used to estimate rail cost functions, while survey data were used to provide truck rate functions, surrogates for truck supply functions. Our computations indicate that while transport rates will generally nrse after deregulation, rail rates will increase relatively more in markets characterized by low-volume or, short-haul activity. This will encourage a redistribution of freight patterns between rail and truck. Essentially, we argue that trucks will dominate in low-volume or short-haul markets so that just about all shipments made by country grain elevators will be by truck. On the other hand, rail will predominate over shipments made from inland terminal elevators to coast export markets, even in the face of barge competition. It is particularly interesting that these conclusions are implied by either of the two polar deregulation cases. That is, our conclusions are the same whether railroads price competitively or coordinate their actions. Of course, there is one difference: rates will tend to be slightly higher under coordination.

R. S. Bower, Impact of Regulation on Economic Behavior: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 36, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty Ninth Annual Meeting American Finance Association, Denver, September 5-7, 1980 (May, 1981), pp. 397-399