by Bob Burkhardt
14.383
Converted to HTML July 27, 1998.
This is a paper I did as a graduate student in economics at M.I.T. It started out as a paper for a class in American (well parts of North America anyway) economic history with Peter Temin who received it well. I later revised it and used it as my paper for the econometrics class although I threw in at least one statistical investigation that didn't have much to do with econometrics. The econometricians (Frank Fisher and Jerry Hausman) tolerated it.
A significant part of it was written in the public library at Elko, Nevada, while I waited for a train going east. I had accidentally gotten on a train going west in Salt Lake City after visiting people there on my way back from a visit home.
There should be some acknowledgements somewhere, but there aren't. I bounced some ideas off some people in the Sloan School who Peter Temin referred me to and drove a librarian in the Harvard Business School to distraction getting old volumes of business reports out of the basement.
I can't remember what the "s.e.e." abbreviation that appears in all the regressions stands for. Maybe it should be "s.s.e." (sum of squared errors).
A version in PDF format is available.
| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
| Chapter 2: | The Theory |
| Chapter 3: | Economies of Scale: S.E.C. Evidence |
| Chapter 4: | Merger Activity and Differential Costs of Capital |
| Chapter 5: | Distribution of Capitalizations and Flotation Costs |
| References |
Tables
| Table 3.1: | Cost of Flotation: Bonds |
| Table 3.2: | Cost of Flotation: Preferred Stock |
| Table 3.3: | Cost of Flotation: Common Stock |
| Table 3.4: | Cost of Flotation: Unsegregated Types of Securities |
| Table 5.1: | Liabilities of Unincorporated Businesses, 1900 |
| Table 5.2: | Distributions of Capitalizations and Flotations Compared |