David E. Harrington's research while affiliated with Kenyon College and other places
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Publications (22)
We find that state mandated facility requirements may constrain the size and location of funeral homes. Many states have funeral regulations that require funeral homes to have embalming rooms, chapels, and casket display rooms. Often these facilities go unused, providing no discernible benefit to consumers while imposing unnecessary costs on firms....
A couple of weeks before the 2012 Super Bowl, Andrew Lehren of The New York Times advised fans wanting tickets to be “patient,” because prices in secondary ticket markets tend to fall “precipitously” as the time to kickoff nears. Using data compiled from SeatGeek.com on more than 46,000 ticket postings in the two weeks prior to the 2013 Super Bowl...
Some states prohibit mortuaries from offering cemetery services and cemeteries from offering mortuary services. This prohibition is justified as being in the interest of the consumer, out of concern that a few firms could come to dominate the death-care industry. This paper uses multivariate regression to empirically test this justification. It fin...
Secondary ticket markets for concerts and sporting events have become increasingly competitive over the past several years as states moved to legalize market-priced transactions on these markets and as internet innovation made possible online resale marketplaces and ticket aggregators. These innovations have increased the size of secondary ticket m...
Over the last few decades, the gender composition of funeral directors in the United States has changed dramatically as women have entered this traditionally male-dominated occupation. To practise as funeral directors, women (and men) must be licensed in all but one state. The most extensive training requirements exist in the 27 states with ‘ready-...
The popularity of StubHub, an event ticket secondary market, has led several state legislatures to repeal price ceilings on the resale of event tickets. Some have criticized this repeal, arguing that prices on the secondary market will rise dramatically as a result, to the detriment of consumers. This article empirically examines that concern, usin...
The U.S. autopsy rate has fallen precipitously since the 1940s, decreasing from 50 percent of bodies to less than eight percent today. Much of the decrease occurred after 1971 when hospitals were no longer required to do a minimum number of autopsies for accreditation. Since this time, major changes in the health care sector have occurred in the Un...
Conventional wisdom holds that consumers in the marketplace are often powerless to confront 'greedy' price-gouging suppliers and that government intervention is thus necessary to protect the consumers. But in fact, markets are often much better at disciplining greed than government regulation. To demonstrate this, this paper examines the secondary...
Thirty-nine states currently have ready-to-embalm laws, which typically require that all firms selling any type of funeral service (even those specializing in cremations) have embalming preparation rooms and all funeral directors be trained as embalmers. Ready-to-embalm laws are designed to preserve the status-quo in funeral markets, thereby protec...
The U.S. autopsy rate has fallen precipitously over the last half century, from 50 percent of bodies to less than eight percent today. Using data for 46 states from 1987 to 2000, we analyze the degree to which the decrease in the autopsy rate is due to better imaging technology or to cost pressures. We find that cost cutting pressures are more resp...
It is well known that federal law prohibits any kind of payment for transplant organs. But few people realize that cadaver markets do allow payments, and the cadaver market, unlike the organ market, experiences great surpluses. The asymmetric treatment of whole and partial body donations is ethically indefensible and economically inefficient, fueli...
Although many people believe that immigrants displace native workers, most economic research finds that immigration has little or no adverse effect on natives' employment outcomes. An unusual opportunity to explore this question in the context of a narrowly defined labor market is afforded by the influx of Vietnamese immigrants into California's ma...
Although many people believe that immigrants displace native workers, most economic research finds that immigration has little or no adverse effect on natives’ employment outcomes. An unusual opportunity to explore this question in the context of a narrowly defined labor market is afforded by the influx of Vietnamese immigrants into California’s ma...
The goal of Howitt's positive mathematical programming procedure is to calibrate a mathematical programming model so that it will reproduce a set of base data for the primal variables. This article develops an analogous procedure allowing one to specify the levels of both primal and dual variables. This article also sheds light on a potential ambig...
This article presents evidence that state funeral regulations affect the choice of whether to cremate or bury dead bodies. States that require either funeral directors to be embalmers or funeral homes to have embalming preparation rooms have lower cremation rates, holding other factors such as income, age, educational attainment, nativity, religiou...
This paper examines the television networks' coverage of the unemployment rate, the inflation rate as measured by the Consumer
Price Index, and the growth rate of real GNP over the twelve years from 1973 through 1984. This time period includes two major
recessions, two severe bursts of inflation, and three presidential elections. A common complaint...
Are state regulations impeding innovation and harming consumers in this very meaningful sector of the economy? Regulatory protection of rents and the status quo can happen in almost any market, including ones that are not often discussed but that are very important to us as human beings. One such example is the market for funeral-related goods and...
Since the 1970s, the state of Florida changed its licensing regulations for workers and firms selling cremation services several times. In 1979, the state introduced a new category of funeral licenses that lowered barriers to entry for firms selling exclusively no-frill cremations, ones involving neither a viewing nor memorial service. The new lice...
Citations
... In addition, research has found that fans are willing to pay premium prices for weekend games, key opponents, winning teams, and promotions (Paul & Weinbach, 2013), and that prior and current season win percentages, rankings, ticket scarcity, new stadiums, and point spreads predict secondary market prices (Drayer, Rascher, & McEvoy, 2012). Further research has supported that time-related factors have significant influence on secondary market pricing (Harrington & Treber, 2014;Dwyer, Drayer, & Shapiro, 2013). ...
... Talking about prohibiting funeral homes and direct disposition establishments from operating under the same roof, they say, "There is some sentiment in the industry that the performance of funeral and direct disposal services when conducted at adjacent locations can confuse the general public" (Florida House of Representatives, 2000). In contrast, the Arizona Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers argues exactly the opposite, that stand-10 In the next version of the paper, we plan to use the model developed in Chevalier, Harrington and Scott Morton (2008) to estimate what would have happened in funeral markets in the absence of these changes in regulations. alone direct disposal establishments would confuse consumers, causing some consumers to buy direct cremations when they really want traditional ones. ...
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... In some states, the sale of caskets is limited to licensed professionals. Historically, the purchase of a casket was tied to the embalming and funeral services offered, similar to the tying of vision exams and contacts in the vision market (Harrington 2003). Likewise, both industries have had FTC rules attempt to reduce barriers to competition. ...
... For instance, B. Faye and F. Channac (2017) as well as P. Canofari et al. (2013) have analysed the prices of burial plots, I. Hussein and J. Rugg (2003), M.E. Wickersham and R. Yehl (2013), T. Longoria (2014), have studied the management of cemeteries, while D. Harrington and J. Treber (2013) have examined the market for funeral services. ...
... Since StubHub entered the secondary ticket marketplace, it has grown into a multi-billion-dollar indus- try. The secondary market allows consumers to have access to ticket discounts or sold out concerts (Harrington and Harrington 2012). One-third of all popular concert tickets are purchased in the secondary ticket market (Krueger and Connolly 2008). ...
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... This instability was amplified by the newly emerged independent media competing for audiences. In contrast to the more optimistic, yet ambiguous message peddled by economists and government officials, media coverage is skewed towards negative news (Harrington, 1989). The hysterical and repetitive message of doom blasted through various channels reinforces the image of a nation hopelessly in decline. ...
... The offering of financial incentives as a way to increase donor numbers or as an acknowledgement for donors is generally considered to detract from the act of donation and serve as a deterrent [3]. However, a US study showing a positive correlation between body donation numbers and funeral cover cost savings offered as compensation suggests that, in reality, the added incentive could be a persuasive factor for donors [4]. ...
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... What could account for the differences between the effects of the entry-level license and the X-ray permit? Recent empirical research suggests that licensing with stringent qualification requirements reduces the representation of minorities in an occupation, plausibly because minorities have more difficulties fulfilling the licensing requirements (Cathles et al., 2010;Federman et al., 2006). Several recent papers also show that licensing can improve the employment opportunities of minorities and reduce the racial/gender wage gap if the license reveals information that would otherwise be difficult to ascertain Marks, 2009, 2017;Blair and Chung, 2018b). 2 Could these mechanisms be at play here? ...
... Gardner (1975) employed the Muth model to investigate the implications of supply and demand shifts on food prices. Studies such as Sumner and Wohlgenant (1985), Kinnucan and Christian (1997), Wohlgenant (1999), Preckel et al. (2002), Sumner (2005), Martini (2011), andOkrent andAlston (2012) used the EDM to investigate the implications of different agricultural policies. Griffith et al. (2010Griffith et al. ( , 2013, Griffith and Thompson (2012), Zhang et al. (2018), and Mounter et al. (2019) used the EDM to analyze the distributional effects of the adoption of new agricultural technologies. ...
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... Managed care principles include capitated payments, lower reimbursement rates, review of utilization rates with the intent of reducing them, and more prudent use of expensive diagnostic procedures (Cunningham et al., 1999;Mechanic, 2004). From the perspective of healthcare providers, managed care is a threat to clinical decision-making because of its focus on an organization's financial performance instead of prioritizing whatever is best for the patient (Harrington and Sayre, 2010;Mechanic, 2001). Its focus on fiscal matters of healthcare provision situates managed care as a countervailing power to physicians' professional autonomy. ...
