the impact of survey characteristics on the measurement of food consumption abstract survey characteristics affect the quality of the measurement of food consumption within households thus it is important to identify best practices for designing surveys that collect food data this paper analyses the impact of survey characteristics on the measurement of food consumption from a sample of 81 national surveys results highlight regularities that can inform best practices in designing surveys and promoting the use of the data for multiple purposes surveys focused on food acquisition collect higher food quantities compared to those that target food consumption surveys based on recall interviews collect higher food quantities compared to those based on diaries but the difference decreases with long reference periods the use of standard units of measurement as well as the consideration of partakers in meals and of seasonality generates significant differences in the survey results the impact of the different survey characteristics carries substantive implications when food consumption data are employed for assessing food security conditions the results are part of a wider work program aimed at improving the quality of household survey data more evidence is needed ideally through coordinated sets of analyses and experiments in different contexts additionally survey characteristics must be complemented by effective field work in order to generate high quality data towards this end statistical capacity development is crucial to promote better data and more evidence based decision making

optimal pricing and return policies for perishable commodities this paper considers the pricing decision faced by a producer of a commodity with a short shelf or demand life a hierarchical model is developed and the results of the single period inventory model are used to examine possible pricing and return policies the paper shows that several such policies currently in effect are suboptimal these include those where the manufacturer offers retailers full credit for all unsold goods or where no returns of unsold goods are permitted the paper also demonstrates that a policy whereby a manufacturer offers retailers full credit for a partial return of goods may achieve channel coordination but that the optimal return allowance will be a function of retailer demand therefore such a policy cannot be optimal in a multi retailer environment it is proven however that a pricing and return policy in which a manufacturer offers retailers a partial credit for all unsold goods can achieve channel coordination in a multi retailer environment this article was originally published in marketing science volume 4 issue 2 pages 166 176 in 1985

on the effects of downstream entry we study the effects of entry in a downstream market where firms e g compaq and ibm cvs and safeway buy an input e g microprocessor grocery items from an upstream supplier e g intel procter gamble and sell their output to consumers we show demand conditions where contrary to conventional wisdom entry of a new downstream firm lowers the downstream market output and increases the consumer price thus consumers may be better off with fewer sellers in such markets we also show that this entry may cause the profit of each incumbent downstream firm to i remain unchanged ii decrease or iii even increase also for a class of widely used demand conditions the supplier s optimal price is shown invariant to the entry exit of its downstream buyer firms we classify all possible effects of downstream entry in terms of fundamental market demand conditions

supply chain competition with multiple manufacturers and retailers we study competition in a supply chain where multiple manufacturers compete in quantities to supply a set of products to multiple risk averse retailers who compete in quantities to satisfy the uncertain consumer demand for the symmetric supply chain we give closed form expressions for the unique equilibrium we find that provided there is a sufficiently large number of manufacturers and retailers the supply chain efficiency the ratio of the aggregate utility in the decentralized and centralized chains can be raised to 1 by inducing the right degree of retailer differentiation also risk aversion results in triple marginalization retailers require a strictly positive margin to distribute even when they are perfectly competitive because otherwise they are unwilling to undertake the risk associated with the uncertainty in demand for the asymmetric supply chain we show how numerical optimization can be used to compute the equilibria and we find that the supply chain efficiency may drop sharply with the asymmetry of either manufacturers or retailers we also find that the introduction of asymmetric product assortment reduces the degree of competition among retailers and thus has an effect similar to that of reducing the number of retailers we show that unlike in the symmetric chain the asymmetric chain efficiency depends on product differentiation and risk aversion because of the interaction between these features and the asymmetry of manufacturers and retailers

competition and corporate performance are people right to think that competition improves corporate performance my investigations indicate first that there are some theoretical reasons for believing this hypothesis to be correct but they are not overwhelming furthermore the existing empirical evidence on this question is weak however the results reported here based on an analysis of around 670 u k companies do provide some support for this view most important i present evidence that competition as measured by increased numbers of competitors or by lower levels of rents is associated with a significantly higher rate of total factor productivity growth

assessing output performance of information technology service industries productivity innovation and catch up abstract the purpose of this paper is to assess the output performance of information technology it service industries of twelve organization of economic cooperation and development oecd countries over the years from 2000 to 2011 we use malmquist productivity index mpi as the performance metric and stochastic production frontier spf as the measurement approach we then decompose mpi into two ingredient components that represent technological change for innovation capability and efficiency change for catch up effort it is found that the it service industries display an impressive annual rate of 7 4 for productivity growth during the study period the parametric decomposition of mpi unveils that almost all of the productivity growth observed is enabled by technological advance made to the production process by it service providers while efficiency change has little effect moreover each country s it service industry demonstrates a distinctive pattern relating to the three measures of productivity growth technological change and efficiency change this observation suggests that each country s it service industry possesses certain strengths that become the sources of its competitive advantage and there are weaknesses that could be targets for performance improvement based on our empirical results we offer practical implications and identify future research topics for performance evaluation of it service and other industries

market share market value and innovation in a panel of british manufacturing firms this paper examines the empirical relationship between technological innovations market share and stock market value new developments in the estimation of dynamic count data models are used to control for unobserved firm specific heterogeneity we find a robust and positive effect of market share on observable headcounts of innovations and patents although increased product market competition in the industry tends to stimulate innovative activity furthermore the impact of innovation on market value is larger for firms with higher market shares we argue that our results are consistent with models where high market share firms have incentives to pre emptively innovate

on the examination of non linear relationship between market structure and performance in the us manufacturing industry abstract this paper attempts to investigate the causal link between market structure and industry performance using a micro panel data set of usa manufacturing industries over the period 1958 2007 we employ a novel panel gmm model strongly accounting for endogenous regressors and threshold variable the empirical findings denote the existence of a non monotonic relationship between market structure and total factor productivity tfp our findings call for future research on the impact of market structure on consumer welfare

methods of household consumption measurement through surveys experimental results from tanzania consumption expenditure has long been the preferred measure of household living standards however accurate measurement is a challenge and household expenditure surveys vary widely across many dimensions including the level of reporting the length of the reference period and the degree of commodity detail these variations occur both across countries and also over time within countries there is little current understanding of the implications of such changes for spatially and temporally consistent measurement of household consumption and poverty a field experiment in tanzania tests eight alternative methods to measure household consumption on a sample of 4 000 households there are significant differences between consumption reported by the benchmark personal diary and other diary and recall formats under reporting is particularly relevant in illiterate households and for urban respondents completing household diaries recall modules measure lower consumption than a personal diary with larger gaps among poorer households and households with more adult members variations in reporting accuracy by household characteristics are also discussed and differences in measured poverty as a result of survey design are explored the study concludes with recommendations for methods of survey based consumption measurement in low income countries

measuring the impacts of production risk on technical efficiency a state contingent conditional order m approach this article studies the influence of risk on farms technical efficiency levels the analysis extends the order m efficiency scores approach proposed by daraio and simar 2005 to the state contingent framework the empirical application focuses on cross section data of catalan specialized crop farms from the year 2011 results suggest that accounting for production risks increases the technical performance a 10 increase in output risk will result in a 2 5 increase in average firm technical performance 2014 elsevier b v all rights reserved

dynamic models of r d innovation and productivity panel data evidence for dutch and french manufacturing abstract this paper introduces dynamics in the r d to innovation and innovation to productivity relationships which have mostly been estimated on cross sectional data it considers four nonlinear dynamic simultaneous equations models that include individual effects and idiosyncratic errors correlated across equations and that differ in the way innovation enters the conditional mean of labor productivity through an observed binary indicator an observed intensity variable or through the continuous latent variables that correspond to the observed occurrence or intensity it estimates these models by full information maximum likelihood using two unbalanced panels of dutch and french manufacturing firms from three waves of the community innovation survey the results provide evidence of robust unidirectional causality from innovation to productivity and of stronger persistence in productivity than in innovation

testing the infrequent purchases model using direct measurement of hidden consumption from food stocks survey reports of zero expenditure result from either genuine non consumption or purchases undertaken too infrequently to observe during a survey with hidden consumption from stocks infrequent purchase models rely on untested hypotheses to distinguish these types of zeros we test such models with data from an unusual survey where food stocks are measured at the start and end of the survey reference period parameter estimates using these direct measures of hidden consumption out of stocks are compared with estimates from infrequent purchase models that attempt to recover this hidden consumption the results suggest considerable bias when using the infrequent purchase models copyright 2012 oxford university press

the effect of income on demand for food in poor countries are our food consumption databases giving us reliable estimates abstract cross section estimates of income elasticities for food staples in the aggregate based on quantity information from household food expenditure surveys are often in the 0 3 0 6 range it is shown that differences in per capita calorie intakes across income groups implied by these income elasticities are grossly inconsistent with observed differences in bodyweights moreover time series data frequently indicate that national per capita consumption of food staples in the aggregate remains constant even as per capita gross national product rises substantially cross section income elasticity estimates are biased upwards due to the failure of food expenditure surveys to undertake an accurate accounting of food transfers from high to low income groups biases which are not generated by survey techniques which record food intakes directly

the risk averse and prudent newsboy the effects of risk and risk aversion in the single period inventory newsboy problem are examined comparative static effects of changes in the various price and cost parameters are determined and related to the newsboy s risk aversion the addition of a random background wealth and of an increase in the riskiness of newspaper demand are also examined although many of the comparative effects generally are ambiguous some fairly simple restrictions on preferences and or risk increases are shown to lead to qualitatively deterministic results

data envelopment analysis truncated regression and double bootstrap for panel data with application to chinese banking we investigate the impact of earning asset diversification on chinese bank efficiency from 2006 to 2011 we do this by adapting the current two stage data envelopment analysis approach to a panel data setting so that we can account for technology change over time our monte carlo experiments illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed new algorithm over the conventional approach when applied to chinese banking data the regression results reveal that increasing the asset share of other earning assets including securities and derivatives is positively associated with bank efficiency decreasing the share of nonearning assets in total assets or increasing total equity has a similar impact our results also suggest that financial reforms currently being undertaken in china including removing the regulatory requirement concerning the ratio of loans to deposits a draft amendment to the existing commercial banking law and interest rate liberalization a proposed draft amendment are likely to have a positive effect on bank efficiency in china

testing static oligopoly models conduct and cost in the sugar industry 1890 1914 we explore the widespread methodology of using demand information to infer market conduct and unobserved cost components under the hypothesis of static oligopoly behavior direct measures of marginal cost and conduct indicating small market power serve as benchmarks the more competitive models yield better cost estimates the best cost estimates occur when conduct is estimated as a free parameter which in turn only slightly underestimates our direct measure it also tracks the decline in market power accompanying the industry s structural changes the methodology is largely validated although partial cost information can improve its predictive power conclusions are robust to demand function

a note on price and quantity competition in differentiated oligopolies abstract in this note we show that the results developed in n singh and x vives 1984 rand j econ 15 546 554 are sensitive to the duopoly assumption if there are more than two firms prices may be higher under price competition than under quantity competition this will be the case if quality differences are large and goods are complements if goods are substitutes high quality firms may earn higher profits under price competition than under quantity competition hence it is not evident which kind of competition is more efficient journal of economic literature classification numbers d43 l13

competitive conditions and sectors productive efficiency a conditional non parametric frontier analysis abstract the scope of this paper is to build an appropriate nonparametric frontier framework by using time dependent conditional efficiency estimators to investigate how competition and time affect the process of technological change and technological catch up our empirical analysis utilizes a sample of 462 u s 6 digit manufacturing sectors over the period 1958 2009 contrary to the existing studies we apply the probabilistic approach of efficiency measurement to evaluate the dynamic effects alongside with the effects of competition on the sectors technological change and technological catch up levels moreover we estimate the sectors idiosyncratic efficiencies which are an approximation of solow s residual representing the unexplained part of the time dependent conditional measures the empirical results shed new light on the topic and signify that the dynamic effect of competitive conditions has a nonlinear effect on the sectors estimated performance specifically we unveil a u shaped curve between market concentration and technological change implying that the sectors higher concentration levels enhance their technological change levels e g innovation capacity having however a downsize effect on their technological catch up ability moreover the relationship between the sectors market concentration and technological catch up although non linear exhibits an n shaped curve with two turning points lastly the above findings remain robust when we limit our analysis to the capital intensive sectors

does market structure affect labour productivity and wages evidence from a smooth coefficient semiparametric panel model this paper investigates the impact of market structure on labour productivity and wages using a panel data set of us manufacturing industries over the period 1958 2007 to account for nonlinear effects we employ a smooth coefficient semiparametric model scsm we find evidence in support of a nonlinear relationship between market concentration and labour productivity and wages lastly our empirical findings shed new light on the competition labour productivity nexus

is the effect of competition on price dispersion nonmonotonic evidence from the u s airline industry we investigate the effect of competition on price dispersion in the airline industry using panel data from 1993 to 2008 we find a nonmonotonic effect of competition on price dispersion an increase in competition is associated with greater price dispersion in concentrated markets but with less price dispersion in competitive markets an inverse u relationship our empirical findings are consistent with an oligopolistic second degree price discrimination model and encompass contradictory findings in the literature

food counts measuring food consumption and expenditures in household consumption and expenditure surveys this special issue presents new evidence on the impact of survey design choices on the quality and availability of data collected in household consumption and expenditure surveys hces the 13 studies in this issue analyze how different survey design options affect the quality of the data being collected and the implications for statistical inference and policy analysis the studies offer practical insights into survey design for national statistical offices and survey practitioners worldwide and also provide policymakers with improved tools and a better understanding of poverty food security and nutrition for effective policymaking

competition conduct and demand elasticity abstract this paper demonstrates the relationship between the rosse panzar test for competitive conduct and the firm s elasticity of demand and develops a method of increasing the test s discriminating power

technical note a comparison of bertrand and cournot profits in oligopolies with differentiated products we compare equilibrium profits of bertrand price and cournot quantity competition in oligopolies with an arbitrary number of nonsymmetric firms offering differentiated substitutable products under an affine demand function we provide a precise characterization of the profit relationship in terms of 1 the number of firms 2 their relative quality and cost differences and 3 the competition intensity defined as the maxiumum absolute value of total change in competitors demand over change in own demand due to a unit change in own price we first examine the case where firms have the same demand sensitivity to own price and the same demand sensitivity to competitor prices but different cost and quality parameters for this case we prove that the total profit of the industry under cournot competition is at least as high as the total profit under bertrand competition if the number of firms is less than 28 or if the competition intensity is less than 0 909 or if the differences in quality and cost competitiveness between firms are small we also prove that for each firm the profit achieved under cournot competition is at least as high as the profit achieved under bertrand competition if the number of firms is less than eight or if the competition intensity is less than 0 739 we then provide numerical and analytical results that qualitatively support the same conclusions for general affine demand functions with variable demand sensitivities to prices

what determines productivity lessons from the dramatic recovery of the u s and canadian iron ore industries following their early 1980s crisis great lakes iron ore producers had faced no competition from foreign iron ore in the great lakes steel market for nearly a century as the 1970s closed in the early 1980s as a result of unprecedented developments in the world steel market brazilian producers were offering to deliver iron ore to chicago the heart of the great lakes market at prices substantially below prices of local iron ore the u s and canadian iron ore industries faced a major crisis that cast doubt on their future in response to the crisis these industries dramatically increased productivity labor productivity doubled in a few years whereas it had changed little in the preceding decade materials productivity increased by more than half capital productivity increased as well i show that most of the productivity gains were due to changes in work practices work practice changes reduced overstaffing and hence increased labor productivity by increasing the fraction of time equipment was in operating mode changes in work pra

impact of survey design in the estimation of habitual food consumption abstract this paper evaluates the impact of survey design on food consumption measurement using data from the mongolia household socio economic survey mses 2007 2008 we exploit the fact that the mses uses a diversified approach to collect food data by measuring consumption acquisition and stocks using both diaries and recall interviews first we estimate the effect of diary length on reporting of food consumption finding a significant decrease of reported food over time we conclude that shorter diaries would increase the quality of estimates and lower the costs of inquiry second we show that recall interviews combined with a measurement of stocks perform well in measuring household food consumption compared to diaries third we find cyclical variation in food consumption and acquisition not only between months but also within months and weeks especially for food acquisition we detect large difference within months which can lead to biased estimates of food acquisition this highlights the need for enumeration to be spread over time to overcome cyclicality on food acquisition and consumption

assessing competition with the panzar rosse model the role of scale costs and equilibrium the panzar rosse test has been widely applied to assess competitive conduct often in specifications controlling for firm scale or using a price equation we show that neither a price equation nor a scaled revenue function yields a valid measure for competitive conduct moreover even an unscaled revenue function generally requires additional information about costs and market equilibrium to infer the degree of competition our theoretical findings are confirmed by an empirical analysis of competition in banking using a sample containing more than 100 000 bank year observations on more than 17 000 banks in 63 countries during the years 1994 2004

efficiency assessment of primary care providers a conditional nonparametric approach this paper uses a fully nonparametric approach to estimate efficiency measures for primary care units incorporating the effect of exogenous environmental factors this methodology allows us to account for different types of variables continuous and discrete describing the main characteristics of patients served by those providers in addition we use an extension of this nonparametric approach to deal with the presence of undesirable outputs in data represented by the rates of hospitalization for ambulatory care sensitive condition acsc the empirical results show that all the exogenous variables considered have a significant and negative effect on efficiency estimates

preemptive patenting and the persistence of monopoly this article takes a different tack and inquires whether institutions such as the patent system create opportunities for firms with monopoly power to maintain their monopoly power the results apply to other situations such as brand identification spatial location and capacity expansion which share the characteristic that early or preemptive actions may lower the returns to potential competitors

strategic technology choice and capacity investment under demand uncertainty this paper studies the impact of competition on a firm s choice of technology product flexible or product dedicated and capacity investment decisions specifically we model two firms competing with each other in two markets characterized by price dependent and uncertain demand the firms make three decisions in the following sequence choice of technology technology game capacity investment capacity game and production quantities production game the technology and capacity games occur while the demand curve is still uncertain and the production game is postponed until after the demand curve is revealed we develop best response functions for each firm in the technology game and compare how a monopolist and a duopolist respond to a given flexibility premium we show that the firms may respond to competition by adopting a technology which is the same as or different from what the competitor adopts we conclude that contrary to popular belief flexibility is not always the best response to competition flexible and dedicated technologies may coexist in equilibrium we demonstrate that as the difference between the two market sizes increases a duopolist is willing to pay less for flexible technology whereas the decision of a monopolist is not affected further we find that a firm that invests in flexibility benefits from a low correlation between demands for two products but the extent of this benefit differs depending on the competitor s technology choice our results indicate that higher demand substitution may or may not promote the adoption of flexibility under competition whereas it always facilitates the adoption of flexibility without competition finally we show that contrary to intuition as the competitor s cost of capacity increases the premium a flexible firm is willing to pay for flexibility decreases

a robust nonparametric approach to evaluate and explain the performance of mutual funds the topic of the measurement of mutual funds performance is receiving an increasing interest both from an applied and a theoretical perspective beside the traditional financial literature a growing body of studies has started to apply the tools of frontier analysis for benchmarking comparisons in portfolio analysis our paper contributes to this literature proposing a robust nonparametric approach for analysing mutual funds it is based on the concept of order m frontier cazals c florens j p simar l 2002 nonparametric frontier estimation a robust approach journal of econometrics 106 1 25 and on a probabilistic approach daraio c simar l 2005 introducing environmental variables in nonparametric frontier models a probabilistic approach journal of productivity analysis 24 1 93 121 to find out the factors explaining mutual funds performance within this framework a decomposition of conditional efficiency is proposed and its usefulness for economic interpretation analysed our approach is illustrated by using us mutual funds data grouped for category by objective economies of scale slacks and market risks are investigated a comparison of traditional nonparametric and robust performance measures is also offered

does it matter how we survey demand for food evidence from kenya and the philippines abstract this article examines the reliability of food quantity information collected from expenditure surveys and finds that measurement errors will very often be systematically correlated with income such that the response of food intakes to increases in income is seriously overstated this may be firstly because food quantities are not measured independently of income if total expenditures are the proxy used for income and secondly because food transfers in the form of guest and hired worker meals are under recorded these biases are illustrated using household surveys from kenya and the philippines

an alternative semiparametric approach to the modelling of asymmetric gasoline price adjustment in this paper we revisit the wholesale and retail gasoline price adjustments to fluctuations in the input cost prices for a monthly panel dataset of 48 us states over the period 1994 to 2011 in doing so we employ for the first time in the empirical literature nonlinear semiparametric models with local generalized method of moments gmm estimators our findings indicate that wholesale and retail gasoline prices adjust more rapidly in an upward than a downward direction confirming the rockets and feathers hypothesis

competition and structure in serial supply chains with deterministic demand supply chains often consist of several tiers with different numbers of firms competing at each tier a major determinant of the structure of supply chains is the cost structure associated with the underlying manufacturing process in this paper we examine the impact of fixed and variable costs on the structure and competitiveness of supply chains with a serial structure and price sensitive linear deterministic demand the entry stage is modeled as a simultaneous game where the players take the outcomes of the subsequent post entry cournot competition into account in making their entry decisions we derive expressions for prices and production quantities as functions of the number of entrants at each tier of a multitier chain we characterize viability and stability of supply chain structures and show using lattice arguments that there is always an equilibrium structure in pure strategies in the entry game finally we examine the effects of vertical integration in the two tier case altogether the paper provides a framework for comparing a variety of supply chain structures and for studying how they are affected by cost structures and by the number of entrants throughout the chain

productivity growth measurement and decomposition under a dynamic inefficiency specification the case of german dairy farms abstract standard parametric models for efficiency and total factor productivity growth measurement either impose strict structures on the time evolution of efficiency scores or no structure at all when the data capture a sector in turbulent periods both specifications may be inappropriate the dynamic stochastic frontier model takes a middle way in terms of the time structure it imposes on efficiency scores we apply the dynamic stochastic frontier model to the case of german dairy farms in a period that is characterized by high milk price volatility the model is able to capture time specific efficiency and total factor productivity growth shocks that may have been induced by this high volatility furthermore the dynamic stochastic frontier model is favored by the data when compared to a model that imposes a very restrictive time structure on efficiency and two models that do not impose any time structure at all

3rd of tha month do social security recipients smooth consumption between checks this paper examines the response of consumption expenditures to the monthly receipt of social security checks since the amount and arrival date of these checks are known to the recipients the basic life cycle permanent income hypothesis lcpih predicts that consumption should not respond to the receipt of these checks using daily diary data from the consumer expenditure survey this paper finds evidence that both the dollar amount and probability of expenditures increase immediately following the receipt of this check most relevant to testing the lcpih categories of instantaneous consumption expenditure such as food away from home increase on the check arrival date the response is found primarily amongst households for whom social security is the primary source of income however the magnitude of the estimated responses are relatively small and do not suggest that the utility losses are large from this non smoothing behavior this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item