[4] Meyer and three co-authors (Merton Peck, John Stenason and Charles Zwick) published The Economics of Competition in the Transportation Industries in 1959.
This made railroads less efficient and less profitable because intercity rail’s great comparative advantage was moving goods over long distances.
Meyer's second influential book on the topic was The Urban Transportation Problem, co-authored with John F. Kain and Martin Wohl.
In 1958, he and fellow Harvard professor Alfred H. Conrad published The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South in the Journal of Political Economy.
Using rigorous statistics, the authors concluded that the view that slavery in the United States would have disappeared without the American Civil War, as claimed by Charles W. Ramsdell, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, and other historians is not supported by evidence.