We investigate the impact of passenger shipping cartels on trans-Atlantic migration during the early twentieth century. We assemble from primary sources a detailed database of passenger flows and cartel operations and show that cartel operation reduced migratory flows by approximately 20% to 25%. Further, we show that there was no strong intertemporal substitution in migration to North America (at least in the short run) and, therefore, that the effects of cartel operation were not "undone" by later migration. Lastly, we find that cartel operation had no appreciable effect on the variability of migration flows, providing evidence against the notion that unfettered competition was destabilizing to turn-of-the-century transportation markets. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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When firms bid in procurement auctions, they take into account the likelihood of future contract renegotiations. If they anticipate that certain input quantities will change ex post, they have an incentive to strategically skew their itemized bids, thereby increasing profits for themselves and costs for the procuring agency. We develop and estimate a structural model of strategic bidding using a data set of road construction projects in Vermont. We find that bidding strategies lead to increased markups for renegotiated items and reduced markups for nonrenegotiated items, results consistent with bid-skewing. * Manuscript

In the War of the Pacific (1879-1883), Chile defeated Peru and Bolivia, and acquired territories that contained vast deposits of sodium nitrate, a leading fertilizer. Chile's export tax on nitrates later accounted for at least one half of all government revenue. We employ a multi-country model of export taxation in order to simulate the potential government revenues that Bolivia, Chile and Peru could have earned under the counterfactual scenario that Chile did not conquer the nitraterich provinces of its adversaries. Our results are that Peruvian and Bolivian government revenues could have been at least double their historical levels. We estimate that, over the remainder of the nineteenth century, Chile's earnings from nitrates would have fallen by 80%.Keywords Export tax Á Nitrates Á War of the Pacific Á South America JEL Classification C72 Á F13 Á F14 Á F17 Á H21 Á N46 Á N76

There is a substantial theoretical literature on the potential effects of loyalty contracts, but relatively little empirical work. We employ the event study methodology to examine the competitive effects of exclusionary contracts in the ocean shipping industry, where they were the subject of an extended legal and political struggle. We find that some of the most important events in this conflict caused significant changes in shipping firms' stock returns, indicating exclusive contracts increased their profits. We then examine the effect of these events on net exporting industries' stock returns, and provide evidence that these contracts contributed to carriers' market power.