IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v42y1982i04p797-823_02.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Oligopoly Agreement and the Timing of American Railroad Construction

Author

Listed:
  • Harley, C. Knick

Abstract

The railroads in the American West were constructed in a few concentrated building booms. This timing of construction resulted from the alternate creation and collapse of imperfect property rights to rights of way in partially settled areas. These “property rights†arose from strategic behavior within the railroad oligopoly. When enforcement costs of cooperative action were low, the railroads were able to create rents by avoiding construction ahead of demand. When enforcement became difficult, however, construction was the only way to capture rents on unbuilt lines so a construction boom ensued.

Suggested Citation

  • Harley, C. Knick, 1982. "Oligopoly Agreement and the Timing of American Railroad Construction," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 42(4), pages 797-823, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:42:y:1982:i:04:p:797-823_02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0022050700028345/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kenneth Boyer, 2013. "Understanding ICC Rate Structure Regulation: A Spatial Analysis," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 43(1), pages 121-144, August.
    2. Cantillo, Miguel, 2016. "Villains or Heroes? Private Banks and Railroads after the Sherman Act," MPRA Paper 79354, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. C. Jacobs-Crisioni & C. C. Koopmans, 2016. "Transport link scanner: simulating geographic transport network expansion through individual investments," Journal of Geographical Systems, Springer, vol. 18(3), pages 265-301, July.
    4. Barry Eichengreen., 1997. "The Baring Crisis in a Mexican Mirror," Center for International and Development Economics Research (CIDER) Working Papers C97-084, University of California at Berkeley.
    5. Barry Eichengreen, 2011. "Escaping the middle-income trap," Proceedings - Economic Policy Symposium - Jackson Hole, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pages 409-419.
    6. Alfonso Herranz Loncán, 2004. "La dotación de infraestructuras en España, (1844-1935)," Estudios de Historia Económica, Banco de España, number 45, November.
    7. Miguel Cantillo Simon, 2017. "Villains or Heroes? Private Banks and Railroads after the Sherman Act," Working Papers 201701, Universidad de Costa Rica, revised Jan 2017.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:42:y:1982:i:04:p:797-823_02. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jeh .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.