Schwartzman made significant novel contributions to the discipline of Industrial Organization. A standard textbook on IO has testified to his contribution in several places. His core contributions are in the areas Economic Concentration—Regionally and locally, Uncertainty and the Size of Firms, The Burden of Monopoly, Black Unemployment, Rate of Returns in the Pharmaceutical Industry, and the Decline in the Retail and Service Industry. We present some analyses of his contributions as reviewed by others in academic journals. According to Billy R. Dickson, Schwartzman thesis in his book on "Black Unemployment" is based on the microeconomic model of substitution. Here the notion is substitution of factor prices, namely the relative price changes from unskilled labor to skilled labor demand. This analysis was carried out with labor-saving technologies as an instrumental variable. Sam Peltzman has analyzed Schwartzman’s hypothesis that the return in the pharmaceutical industry was declining from better rates in the 1950s and 1960s. The underlying cause for the decline included mainly the increase in regulation through the 1962 Amendments to the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act. Ramrattan and Szenberg analyzed Schwartzman’s analyses of trends in the Retail and Service industries. The study puts into perspective growth and decline in the book industries. Of importance was slow employment growth, which was a quarter of a percent annually from 1929 to 1958, and one percent from 1958 to 1963.
Some of His Works
Schwartzman, David.. Black Unemployment: part of unskilled unemployment. Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
Schwartzman, David.. Games of Chicken - Four Decades of U.S. Nuclear Policy. New York: Praeger Publishers, 248 pages..
Schwartzman, David and Joan Bodoff,. "Concentration in Regional and Local Industries," Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 37, pp. 343–348.
Schwartzman, David.. Production and Productivity in the Service Industries, in Victor R. Fuchs, ed. Studies in Income and Wealth, NBER Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, 34, 201-230.
Schwartzman, David.. "Uncertainty and the Size of Firms," Economica, Vol 30, pp. 287–269.
Schwartzman, David.. "The Burden of Monopoly," Journal of Political Economy, vol. 33, pp. 627–630.
