Robin C. Sickles and Mary L. Streitwieser, "An Analysis of Technology, Productivity, and Regulatory Distortion in the Interstate Natural Gas Transmission Industry: 1977-1985", Journal of Applied Econometrics, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1998, pp. 377-395. The data file, ssdata.dat, is an ASCII data set in DOS format, 33,489 bytes in size, containing 216 observations and 15 variables. It is zipped in the file ssdata.zip. The data are observations on 24 interstate natural gas transmission companies, for the nine years, 1977-1985 (all data are annual). The SAS program used to create this ASCII data file is as follows: data x; file natgas.ss; put id 1-2 year 4-7 q 9-20 .4 xl 22-30 .4 pl 32-41 .4 xe 43-55 .4 pe 57-62 .4 xh 64-75 .4 #2 ph 3-10 .4 rrh 12-19 .4 xp 21-32 .4 pp 34-41 .4 rrp 43-50 .4 capu 52-57 .4 firm $ 59-78; run; Variables in the data set are as follows: id numeric identifies for firm year year, such as '1977' q trillion cubic feet-miles of natural gas transported xl number of employees pl labor price xe billion cubic feet of natural gas used to fuel compressors pe energy price xh horsepower rating of all compressors rrh ex post internal rate of return per compressor horsepower ph service price per compressor horsepower xp tons of steel in transmission line pipes rrp ex post internal rate of return per ton of steel in transmission line pipes pp service price per ton of steel in transmission line pipes capu capacity utilization or transmission system firm company name There are two lines of data for each observations. The observations are sorted by company, by year. Data are from the 1977-85 firm specific FERC Form 2: Annual Report of Major Natural Gas Pipeline Company, supplemented with the Annual Statistics of Interstate Natural Gas Pipeline Companies. Both reports are available at the Public Information Office at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C. Complete details of the data sources and construction can be found in Sickles & Streitwieser (1992), "Technical Inefficiency and Productive Decline in the U.S. Interstate Natural Gas Pipeline Industry Under the Natural Gas Policy Act," Journal of Productivity Analysis, 3, 1/2: 115-130; or contact Streitwieser via e-mail at mstreitw@census.gov.