IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eej/eeconj/v17y1991i1p45-60.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

John M. Clark's Concept of Too Strong Competition: The U.S. Cement Industry as a Possible Case

Author

Listed:
  • Gerald Aranoff

    (Jerusalem College of Technology)

Abstract

The principal hypothesis of this paper is that the U.S. cement industry for most of the sixties and seventies can serve as an instance of John M. Clark's concept of too strong competition. This paper argues that the mainstream academic view--notably that of S. M. Loescher and F. M. Scherer--mischaracterizes the cement industry of 1909-46 due to methodological and data errors. The paper presents evidence that during periods of capacity surplus in the sixties and early seventies cement profit margins were inadequate, despite generally good economic years, and this contributed to reduced investment in the seventies and eighties and to a severe capacity shortages during 1972-73 and 1978-79.

Suggested Citation

  • Gerald Aranoff, 1991. "John M. Clark's Concept of Too Strong Competition: The U.S. Cement Industry as a Possible Case," Eastern Economic Journal, Eastern Economic Association, vol. 17(1), pages 45-60, Jan-Mar.
    • Handle: RePEc:eej:eeconj:v:17:y:1991:i:1:p:45-60
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://web.holycross.edu/RePEc/eej/Archive/Volume17/V17N1P45_60.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. George Terborgh, 1940. "The problem of manufacturing capacity," Federal Reserve Bulletin, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.), issue Jul, pages 639-646.
    2. Eliot Jones, 1920. "Is Competition in Industry Ruinous," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 34(3), pages 473-519.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Aranoff, Gerald, 2011. "Competitive manufacturing with fluctuating demand and diverse technology: Mathematical proofs and illuminations on industry output-flexibility," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 28(3), pages 1441-1450, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Anthony Creane & Thomas D. Jeitschko, 2016. "Endogenous Entry in Markets with Unobserved Quality," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 64(3), pages 494-519, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Cement;

    JEL classification:

    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
    • L61 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Manufacturing - - - Metals and Metal Products; Cement; Glass; Ceramics

    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:eej:eeconj:v:17:y:1991:i:1:p:45-60. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Victor Matheson, College of the Holy Cross (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/eeaa1ea.html .

    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.