This thesis consists of two essays on applied microeconomics issues. The first
essay presents a hedonic price econometric model of vacant commercial land. The second
essay presents cost frontier analysis on the industry and firm's performance of the U.S.
Motor Carrier industry.
Our hedonic price econometric model includes two new developments in estimating
land values in a multicentric urban area First, two composite indexes of market
accessibility and highway accessibility are developed to account for the impacts of different
characteristics of different regional nodes on land value at a particular site. Second, we use
nonlinear least squares to estimate the decay parameters of the accessibility indexes within
the model. We found that market accessibility is the dominant land value determinant. The
estimated market accessibility decay parameter is different in value from the ones that are
commonly assumed in hedonic models. The effect of access to highway interchanges is
insignificant. Corner lots are of higher value. Finally, under Seattle's zoning policy,
zoning classification of neighborhood commercial and community commercial land does
not have significant effect on land value.
The second essay uses the stochastic cost frontiers to analyze the performance of
the U.S. motor carrier industry in the pre- and post-MCA periods. The average industry
inefficiencies were between 14 and 27 percent during studied period. Our results indicate
that the deregulation has no impact on industry efficiency. After a short adjustment period,
the average industry inefficiency in the post-MCA years falls back to its pre-MCA level of
around 14 to 16 percent. We analyzed the firm-specific inefficiencies by tobit regression.
Our result shows that union firms are 1.5 and 4 percent less efficient than non-union firms
in the pre- and post-MCA years, respectively. Firms located in the southern region are
relatively efficient and the ones in the northern regions are relatively inefficient. Our result
supports Stigler's Survivor Principle that survivor firms are relatively efficient. / Graduation date: 1998
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/34160 |
| Date | 11 June 1997 |
| Creators | Lee, Man-keung |
| Contributors | O'Sullivan, Arthur M. |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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