Tires Data Information

The data set contains observations on producers of tires in 1920, where the set of producers and the variables in the file are explained in detail in Steven Klepper and Kenneth L. Simons, "The Making of an Oligopoly: Firm Survival and Technological Change in the Evolution of the U.S. Tire Industry," Journal of Political Economy, vol. 108 no. 4, August 2000, pp. 728-760. The data are organized in a tab-delimited ASCII file. The first variable is a text string and all other variables are numeric. The first line of text contains variable names. The following variables are included:

firmname - Name (subsequent names after semicolons) to 80 characters
backdate - First year listed in Hendricks if earlier than in Thomas', else 0
entryyr - First year listed in Thomas'
exityr - First year not listed in Thomas' (1981 signifies still a producer at end of sample)
acquired - 1 if acquired rather than exited, 0 otherwise
trsize20 - its size code in the 1920 Thomas' volume (1000, 750, 400, 200, 75, 37.5, 17.5, and .01 which correspond to the letter codes AAAA, AAA, AA, A, B, C, D, and X, with the five largest 1920 firms, Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, US Rubber, and Fisk coded as 2000)
akron - 1 if located within 50 miles of Akron, 0 otherwise
cord1917 - 1 if produced a cord tire in the 1917 Tire Rate Book, 0 otherwise
cord1920 - 1 if produced a cord tire in the Oct. 1920 Tire Rate Book, 0 otherwise
ball1923 - 1 if produced a balloon tire in the Dec. 1923 Tire Rate Book, 0 otherwise
distms - 1 if had dealers and/or distributors in multiple states, 0 if not, 9 if unknown

Dates in this file must be corrected to adjust dates on the cover of Thomas' Register of American Manufacturers that do not correspond to actual publication dates. To make this correction, subtract 1 from dates 1912, 1914, 1920, 1921, and 1934+. A Stata do-file made available here shows how to make this correction.

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Rev. 14 Sept. 2006