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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Subcontracting And The Survival Of Plants In The Road Construction Industry: A Panel Quantile Regression Analysis, Dakshina G. De Silva, Georgia Kosmopoulou, Carlos Lamarche May 2017

Subcontracting And The Survival Of Plants In The Road Construction Industry: A Panel Quantile Regression Analysis, Dakshina G. De Silva, Georgia Kosmopoulou, Carlos Lamarche

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper investigates how subcontracting parts of contracted work shapes entrants’ success and survival. We find that newly developed quantile regression approaches can be adapted to study survival of firms competing for government contracts in road construction. The method is applied on a data set that includes patterns of firm entry, exit and auction related information. We find an apparent increase in the business life of firms who subcontract out part of their projects. In Texas, these subcontracting effects appear to be more pronounced for firms with few or no options outside the industry, and among firms who contract out …


The Long Term Effects Of An Aging Fleet On Operational Availability And Cost: Evidence From The Us Coast Guard, Christopher W. Lavin, Robert M. Mcnab, Ryan S. Sullivan Jan 2017

The Long Term Effects Of An Aging Fleet On Operational Availability And Cost: Evidence From The Us Coast Guard, Christopher W. Lavin, Robert M. Mcnab, Ryan S. Sullivan

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper empirically examines whether the aging of a fleet affects operational availability and operating cost using a unique data-set on the 117 47-foot Motor Lifeboats (MLBs) of the United States Coast Guard (USCG). Procured from 1997 to 2003, the 47-foot MLB is the standard lifeboat of the USCG and all 117 MLBs remain in service. The aging of the MLB fleet has resulted in higher annual operating costs and lower operational availability, although the nature of this relationship remains unclear. Our estimation strategy utilizes an error components estimator to examine these issues. We employ three variants of the dependent …