Abstract
The Staggers Rail Act of 1980 provided American railroads with almost complete relief from rate regulation. Regulatory reforms resulted in rapid and pronounced changes in firm behavior and an eventual reconfiguration of the industry as a whole. This investigation provides a highly disaggregated study of deregulated rail rates for seventeen commodities. The results indicate that the Staggers Act fundamentally altered the way in which rail carriers price their services. As importantly, the results suggest that shippers have responded to altered railroad behavior by changing the characteristics of their shipments. Together, the changes in railroad behavior and shipper responses to these variations have produced lower railroad rates for a small but measurable number of movements across a wide range of commodities.
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Burton, M.L. Railroad deregulation, carrier behavior, and shipper response: A disaggregated analysis. J Regul Econ 5, 417–434 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01065406
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01065406