do faculty salaries rise with job seniority abstract previous research suggests that academic salaries fall with greater job seniority using a 1988 national survey we find that the return to seniority is positive over a lengthy employment period tenure status and academic rank also affect the return to seniority

the consequences of minimum wage laws some new theoretical ideas economists generally agree that the effect of a binding minimum wage law is to move firms backward along the demand curve for low skill workers however this prediction of worker displacement depends critically on the assumption that the productivity of firms labor is not dependent on the wage in this paper we show that in a conventional efficiency wage model a minimum wage may increase the level of employment in low wage jobs the formal logic of our model is similar to the case of labor demand under monopsony but arises in a model with a large number of employers

competition wages and teacher sorting lessons learned from a voucher reform this paper studies how local school competition affects teacher wages at markets where wages are set via individual wage bargaining using regional variation in private school entry generated by a swedish reform which allowed private schools to enter freely and a comprehensive matched employer employee data covering all high school teachers in sweden over 16 years i analyze the effects of competition on wages as well as labor flows the results suggest that competition translates into higher wages also for teachers in public schools while the average increases are modest new teachers gain 2 percent and high ability teachers in math and science receive 4 percent higher wages in the most competitive areas compared to areas without any competition from private schools several robustness checks support a causal interpretation of the results which together highlight the potential gains from school competition through a more differentiated wage setting of teachers

cut to the bone hospital takeovers and nurse employment contracts the authors examine changes in the wages employment and effort of nurses in california hospitals following takeovers by large chains in the 1990s the market for nurses has been described as a classic monopsony so that one might expect increases in firm market power to be associated with declines in wages however a basic contracting model predicts effects on effort rather than on wages which is what this analysis finds nurses experienced few declines in wages following takeovers but did see increases in the number of patients per nurse the measure of effort used here the authors show that their results are also consistent with an extended version of the monopsony model that considers effort and allows for revenue shifts following a takeover finally they find that these changes were similar in the largest for profit and non profit chains suggesting that market forces are more important than institutional form

investments holdup and the form of market contracts the authors analyze incomplete contracts to induce efficient investment with exogenous switching costs fixed price contracts are efficient generate some rigidity in prices are renegotiated intermittently by possibly small amounts and when inflation is positive generate asymmetric responses to shocks all consistent with evidence on prices and wages with two sided specific investments efficiency requires prices to have sufficient escalator clauses to avoid renegotiation as observed in many long term contracts a third case with one sided specific investments can generate take or pay contracts and explain why firms sometimes pay for specific investments that appear to benefit employees directly

effects of the minimum wage on the employment status of youths an update the large decline in the relative value of the minimum wage during the 1980s makes that period a valuable one for identifying the impact of variation in the minimum wage on youth employment this study produces the robust finding that when the experience of the 1980s is included a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage is estimated to reduce teen employment by less than 1 percent the lower end of the range of previous estimates because this small employment effect is offset by a labor force withdrawal effect the study finds no discernible effect on measured unemployment the study also finds no apparent effect of the minimum wage on the employment of young adults aged 20 24

estimating a market equilibrium search model from panel data on individuals from albrecht and axell 1984 and is based on workers who are homogeneous in terms of market productivity and heterogeneous in terms of nonmarket productivity and on firms which are heterogeneous in terms of productive efficiency the equilibrium model is contrasted in terms of its fit to the data with an unrestricted version of the model which is based on a mixture of negative binomial distributions the equilibrium model fails to conform to the data in exactly the dimension of its major focus namely it implies that measurement error accounts for almost all of the dispersion in observed wages the equilibrium model also does not do well in fitting the unemployment duration distribution compared to the unrestricted model the problem is that the duration distribution itself does not support the existence of significant heterogeneity as evidenced by the estimates of the unrestricted model the paper also illustrates the use of such models for policy analysis by simulating the welfare effects of a minimum wage

the effect of minimum salaries on employment of teachers a test of the monopsony model author affiliation william m boal college of business and public administration drake university des moines iowa 50311 usa e mail william boal drake edu acknowledgment this paper has benefited from helpful comments on earlier drafts by david harrington and ronald oaxaca by seminar participants at drake university and iowa state university and by anonymous referees 1 introductionthe market for schoolteachers has long been cited as an example of labor monopsony where employers that is school districts enjoy market power ehrenberg and smith 2000 hyclak johnes and thornton 2005 the reasons offered are plausible by definition school districts enjoy exclusive territories teachers have specialized training that might not be interesting to nearby nonschool employers many teachers are second earners in their families and might be unwilling to relocate in response to distant job offers there is some evidence that teachers have strong personal geographic preferences boyd et al 2005 it would appear that the set of potential employers available to a certified teacher is limited to the set of school districts within commuting distance of current residence for these reasons it is often argued that the greatest monopsony power is probably held by rural school districts because of their large geographic size an empirical literature dating back to landon and baird 1971 has tried to document monopsony in this market by regressing teacher salaries on measures of geographic concentration of school districts these studies often appear to find a negative effect of geographic concentration on teacher salaries see luizer and thornton 1986 for a survey a major difficulty with the salary concentration research strategy is that concentration is inversely related to urbanization because urban areas tend to have many school districts in close proximity and salaries for all workers tend to be higher in urban areas the apparent negative estimated effect of concentration may disappear when sufficient measures of urbanization are included ransom boal and beck 1998 moreover the urban rural difference in teacher salaries appears similar to the urban rural difference for other professionals hirsch and nottage 1998 1a second difficulty with the salary concentration research strategy is the increasing presence of teachers unions 2 a monopsonist faces or at least perceives an upward sloping supply of labor this upward slope raises marginal labor cost above the current wage causing the monopsonist to reduce employment equilibrium occurs on the labor supply curve but below the monopsonist s labor demand curve by contrast a union tries to raise the wage by moving the equilibrium above the supply curve estimates based on 1970s data show that unionized teachers enjoyed an average wage differential of roughly 10 3 in some cases a union might even move the equilibrium above the demand curve this is the prediction of the so called contract curve model for which eberts and stone 1984 1986 found some evidence among new york state school districts any test for monopsony ought to exclude unionized districts from the sample or control for unionism in some way this has not generally been done 4a recent seemingly unrelated literature has investigated the effects of legal minimum wages on employment in fast food restaurants katz and krueger 1992 card and krueger 1994 this literature has apparently documented slight increases in employment following increases in minimum wages the authors note that this result is incompatible with competitive labor markets and may be evidence for employer monopsony a modest increase in a minimum wage may increase employment in a monopsonized market because it flattens the employer s perceived labor supply curve and thereby lowers the employer s marginal labor cost curve

underpaid or overpaid wage analysis for nurses using job and worker attributes the nursing labor market presents an apparent puzzle hospitals report chronic shortages yet standard wage analysis shows that nursing wages have increased over time and greatly exceed those received by other college educated women this paper addresses this puzzle data from the current population survey cps are matched with detailed job content descriptors from the occupational information network o net nursing jobs require higher levels of skills and more difficult working conditions than do jobs for other college educated workers a standard cps only wage regression shows a registered nurse rn wage advantage of 22 log points compared to a pooled male female group of college educated workers control for o net job attributes reduces the rn gap to 08 while an arguably preferable nonparametric estimator produces a wage gap estimate close to zero we conclude that nurses receive compensation close to long run opportunity costs narrowing if not resolving the rn wage shortage puzzle

sex discrimination and competition in product and labour markets theoritical explanations for wage discrimination collapse in the long run because competition should drive discriminations firms out of the market in product markets with imperfect competition em

the impact of the minimum wage on other wages in this paper i explore how changes in the minimum wage affect various occupational wages i postulate that other wages increase for two reasons first firms try to mitigate the deterioration in a worker s relative wage which would cause him to reduce his work effort and second there is an increase in the demand for nonminimum wage workers wage adjustment patterns are examined to ascertain whether wage comparisons play a role in the adjustment process the empirical work shows a short run wage compression among white collar occupations which is consistent with the wage comparison model however large standard errors make inferences weak

network connectedness of green bonds and asset classes abstract we identify network connectedness between green bonds and different asset classes over different investment horizons in the eu and us asset markets we first focus on dynamic correlations between green bond and asset class price changes in different time scales on the basis of wavelet coherence we then identify network connectedness by decomposing time series into different frequency components in each of which we evaluate connectedness on the basis of the error variance decomposition of a multivariate vector autoregressive model our empirical evidence reveals strong connectedness between green bonds and treasury and corporate bonds in the short and long run and in both the eu and the usa with green bonds receiving sizeable spillovers from treasury and corporate bond prices and transmitting negligible effects likewise we find that green bonds are weakly connected with high yield corporate bond stock and energy assets over different time scales these findings have implications for green bond investors regarding portfolio design and hedging decisions and for the channelling of financial flows to economic activities that are consistent with a decarbonized economy

monopsony power in the market for nurses estimates are presented of the inverse elasticity of supply of nursing services to the individual hospital a quantity which is a natural measure of employer market power the estimates corresponding to employment changes taking place over one year are quite high in the neighborhood of 0 79 and even for changes taking place over three years are substantial in the neighborhood of 0 26 the estimates do not significantly differ for hospitals in major metropolitan areas and do not depend very sensitively on the assumed form of the oligopsony equilibrium this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

institutional and legal context in natural experiments the case of state antitakeover laws we argue and demonstrate empirically that a firm s institutional and legal context has first order effects in tests that use state antitakeover laws for identification a priori the size and direction of a law s effect on a firm s takeover protection depends on i other state antitakeover laws ii preexisting firm level takeover defenses and iii the legal regime as reflected by important court decisions in addition iv state antitakeover laws are not exogenous for many easily identifiable firms we show that the inferences from nine prior studies related to nine different outcome variables change substantially when we include controls for these considerations

monopsony in the low wage labor market evidence from minimum nurse staffing regulations this paper provides direct evidence on the extent of monopsony power in the low wage labor market by estimating the firm level elasticity of labor supply for nurse aides in the long term care nursing home industry using exogenous variation in hiring induced by the passage of a state minimum nurse staffing law i find that facilities initially out of compliance with the new law did not have to raise their wage offers relative to their competitors in order to hire more nurses while this is consistent with perfect competition in simple monopsony models of the labor market i discuss how the results may be more ambiguous in more complicated models

the changing effects of competition on non profit and for profit hospital pricing behavior abstract has the nature of hospital competition changed from a medical arms race in which hospitals compete for patients by offering their doctors high quality services to a price war for the patients of payors this paper uses time series cross sectional methods on california hospital discharge data from 1986 1994 to show the association of hospital prices with measures of market concentration changed steadily over this period with prices now higher in less competitive areas even for non profit hospitals regression results are used to simulate the price impact of hypothetical hospital mergers

multiple equilibria and minimum wages in labor markets with informational frictions and heterogeneous production technologies it is often argued that a mandatory minimum wage is binding only if the wage density displays a spike at it in this article we analyze a model with search frictions and heterogeneous production technologies in which imposition of a minimum wage affects wages even though after imposition the lowest wage in the market exceeds the minimum wage the model has multiple equilibria as a result of the fact that the reservation wage of the unemployed and the lowest production technology in use affect each other imposition of a minimum wage may improve social welfare

sex discrimination and product market competition the case of the banking industry this paper examines the relationship between product market competition and employment discrimination using an especially constructed data set that links microeconomic data on female employment with measures of market concentration in the banking industry the use of firm specific data drawn from this one industry allows estimation of this relationship in a manner that avoids the problems of interindustry differences that have troubled previous studies the results provide strong support for a negative relationship between market concentration and the relative employment of women further we find that individual market shares are unrelated to female employment suggesting that the relationship is due primarily to differences across markets rather than individual firms

compensating differentials and unmeasured ability in the labor market for nurses why do hospitals pay more nurses employed in hospitals realize a large wage advantage relative to nurses employed elsewhere this paper examines alternative sources of the hospital premium a topic of some interest given the current shifting of medical care out of hospitals whereas cross sectional estimates indicate a hospital rn wage advantage of roughly 20 percent longitudinal analysis suggests that a third to a half of the advantage is due to unmeasured worker ability the remainder is likely to reflect compensating differentials for hospital disamenities we further probe possible sources of the rn hospital premium by examining the receipt of fringe benefits differences in cognitive ability as measured by afqt test scores differences in the quality of experience the role of labor unions and rents earnings on second jobs and the magnitude of wage differentials associated with work shift

classic or new monopsony searching for evidence in nursing labor markets the market for registered nurses rns is often offered as an example of classic monopsony while a new monopsony literature emphasizes that firm labor supply is upward sloping independent of market structure using data from multiple sources we explore the relationship between nursing wages in hospitals and measures of classic and new monopsony wage level analysis fails to provide support for classic monopsony the relative wages of rns in 240 u s labor markets being largely uncorrelated with hospital system concentration longitudinal analysis shows nursing wages declining with increases in hospital concentration we interpret these results as providing support for classic monopsony effects in the short run but question whether wage effects are sustained in the long run no relationship is found between nursing wages and a new monopsony measure of mobility but support for new monopsony is found for women elsewhere in the labor market rns display greater interemployer mobility than do women or men in general two conclusions follow first upward sloping labor supply need not imply monopsonistic outcomes second absent more compelling evidence nursing should not be held up as a prototypical example of monopsony classic or new

exploring the role delaware plays as a domestic tax haven abstract we examine whether delaware is a domestic tax haven we find that taxes play an economically important role in determining whether u s firms locate subsidiaries in delaware and that a delaware based state tax avoidance strategy lowers state effective tax rates by between 0 7 and 1 1 percentage points on average the tax savings represent a 15 24 decrease in the state income tax burden and translate to an increase in net income of 1 04 1 47 however we find that the tax benefits of delaware tax strategies are diminishing over time in response to initiatives by state governments to limit multistate tax avoidance

do takeover defense indices measure takeover deterrence many researchers use the g index or e index to measure firms takeover defenses others argue that these indices are not related to firms takeover likelihoods we find that unlike their raw values the instrumented versions of these indices are significantly and negatively related to acquisition likelihood the difference between the raw and instrumented results indicates that the g index and e index include an endogenous component and highlights the importance of accounting for endogeneity in tests that use takeover indices to measure takeover deterrence we provide data on new instruments that researchers can use to address these issues received april 13 2016 editorial decision october 14 2016 by editor david dennis

green bond and financial markets co movement diversification and price spillover effects abstract we examine co movement between the green bond and financial markets finding that the green bond market couples with corporate and treasury bond markets and weakly co moves with stock and energy commodity markets we also find that green bonds have negligible diversification benefits for investors in corporate and treasury markets whereas diversification benefits are sizeable for investors in stock and energy markets we further confirm that green bonds are affected by substantial price spillovers from corporate and treasury fixed income markets and that large price swings in stock and energy markets have a negligible impact on green bond prices

price and probability decomposing the takeover effects of anti takeover provisions we study the effects of anti takeover provisions atps on the takeover probability the takeover premium and target selection voting to remove an atp increases both the takeover probability and the takeover premium that is there is no evidence of a trade off between premiums and takeover probabilities we provide causal estimates based on shareholder proposals to remove atps and address the endogenous selection of targets through bounding techniques the positive premium effect in less protected firms is driven by better bidder target matching and merger synergies

money and output viewed through a rolling window abstract we examine the extent to which fluctuations in the money stock anticipate or granger cause fluctuations in real output using a variety of rolling window and increasing window estimation techniques various models are considered using simple sum as well as divisia measures of m 1 and m 2 income prices and both the t bill rate and the commercial paper rate findings indicate that the relation between income money prices and interest rates is stable as long as sufficient data are used and that there is cointegration among the variables considered although cointegration spaces become very difficult to estimate precisely when smaller windows of data are used further both m 1 and m 2 are shown to be important predictors of income for the entire period from 1960 2 1996 3 based on modified versions of what we term the most damaging specifications from friedman and kuttner 1993 and thoma 1994 our new evidence is based in part on a rather novel model selection approach to examining the relationship between money and income 1998 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

monopsony power and relative wages in the labor market for nurses this paper examines the thesis that monopsony power is an important determinant of wages in nursing labor markets using data from the 1985 93 current population surveys measures of relative nurse non nurse wage rates for 252 labor markets are constructed contrary to predictions from the monopsony model no positive relationship exists between relative nursing wages and hospital density or market size nor is support found for the presence of monopsony power based on evidence on union wage premiums slopes of experience profiles or the mix of rn to total hospital employment

is hospital competition socially wasteful we study the consequences of hospital competition for medicare beneficiaries heart attack care from 1985 to 1994 we examine how relatively exogenous determinants of hospital choice such as travel distances influence the competitiveness of hospital markets and how hospital competition interacts with the influence of managed care organizations to affect the key determinants of social welfare expenditures on treatment and patient health outcomes in the 1980s the welfare effects of competition were ambiguous but in the 1990s competition unambiguously improves social welfare increasing hmo enrollment over the sample period partially explains the dramatic change in the impact of hospital competition

monopsony and the lifetime relation between wages and productivity we consider the relation between wages and productivity by means of a model based on the following assumptions workers live for 2 periods firms live forever senior workers differ nontrivially from junior seniority enhances workers expected second period earnings both firms and workers recognize the prospect of promotion and the senior junior wage differential at the time of hiring and firms have monopsony power in hiring junior workers we show that senior wages are equal to the senior marginal product but junior wages are set below the junior marginal product by an amount that depends on the elasticity of the firm s labor supply

medicaid managed care effects on children s medicaid coverage and utilization abstract we use data from the national health interview surveys nhis to measure the effects of the growth of medicaid managed care on children we examine both the probability that individual children were medicaid covered and their utilization of care we find that managed care penetration has significant effects on the composition of the medicaid caseload young children are less likely to be covered while poor school age children are more likely to be covered when we examine coverage by race we find that black children are less likely to be covered where medicaid managed care organizations mmcos are more prevalent these lower medicaid enrollment rates are linked to increases in the numbers of young children who go without any doctor visits in a year these results suggest that it is important to examine the potential effects of changes in medicaid on selection into the medicaid program rather than focusing exclusively on the effects of managed care on those who are enrolled in addition among those enrolled in medicaid higher managed care penetration is associated with an increase in the number of black children with chronic conditions who go without doctor visits but with decreases in the number of hispanic children and poor teens who go without care

relationship between green bonds and financial and environmental variables a novel time varying causality abstract in this paper we examine the time varying causal relationship between green bonds and other assets including us conventional bonds wilderhill clean energy equity index and co2 emission allowances price during the period spanning from 30 july 2014 to 10 february 2020 we apply the novel time varying granger causality test shi et al 2018 based on the recursive evolving algorithm introduced by phillips et al 2015a 2015b for controlling financial bubbles to detect real time causality detecting possible changes in the causal direction and dating financial turbulences the study based on this algorithm reveals a significant causality running from the us 10 year treasury bond index to green bonds starting from the end of the year 2016 until the end of the sample period besides we find that the link co2 emission allowances price causing green bonds is significant from the beginning of the sample period to the end of the year 2015 furthermore by using the recursive evolving causality algorithm of the shi et al 2018 test we find that the causality running from the clean energy index to green bonds is very limited to the year 2019 on the other hand there is no significant causality running from green bonds to all considered assets indicating no predictive power for this asset in its proper domain which is not yet examined in the literature

the effect of pro environmental preferences on bond prices evidence from green bonds abstract we use green bonds as an instrument to identify the effect of non pecuniary motives specifically pro environmental preferences on bond market prices we perform a matching method followed by a two step regression procedure to estimate the yield differential between a green bond and a counterfactual conventional bond from july 2013 to december 2017 the results suggest a small negative premium the yield of a green bond is lower than that of a conventional bond on average the premium is 2 basis points for the entire sample and for euro and usd bonds separately we show that this negative premium is more pronounced for financial and low rated bonds the results emphasize the low impact of investors pro environmental preferences on bond prices which does not represent at this stage a disincentive for investors to support the expansion of the green bond market

the union impact on hospital wages and fringe benefits this paper uses 1977 data from a national probability sample of 1 200 hospitals to estimate the effect of unions on wages and fringe benefits in four occupations registered nurses practical nurses secretaries and housekeepers the results show that unionization has a significant impact on wages that increases with the length of time collective bargaining has been in effect at the individual hospital the overall wage effect of unions is about 8 percent for both types of nurses and 11 to 12 percent for secretaries and housekeepers employed in hospitals the authors also estimate an equation for hospital wide fringe benefits which shows that such benefits are positively related to the percent of full time employees in the four occupations covered by union contracts

seniority and monopsony in the academic labor market workers with high seniority usually have higher wages than workers with low seniority and the same total labor marke t experience in contrast the results of this paper indicate that higher seniority is associated with lower salaries for university professors the author documents this finding for national surveys a nd individual institutions and explains it as due to monopsonistic discrimination by employers copyright 1993 by american economic association

monopsony in the labor market this paper surveys recent theoretical and empirical research on monopsony in labor markets broadly defined as upward sloping labor supply to an employer we compare older monopsony models based on small numbers of employers with newer models based on labor market frictions such as moving costs and search we also compare older econometric approaches that focus on static wage concentration relationships with newer approaches that focus on dynamics our review of empirical estimates suggests that monopsony power based on small numbers of employers is probably rare but occasionally large while monopsony power based on frictions is probably widespread but small on average

an estimate of the rent generated by a premium college football player the national collegiate athletic association limits the payments athletes can receive for their services colleges are effectively monosony employers so players will not be paid their marginal revenue product therefore colleges capture an economic rent from players this paper measures these rents by estimating the marginal revenue product of a top college football player the empirical results suggest that a premium college player generates over 500 000 in annual revenues for his team

enjoying the quiet life corporate governance and managerial preferences much of our understanding of corporations builds on the idea that managers when they are not closely monitored will pursue goals that are not in shareholders interests but what goals would managers pursue this paper uses variation in corporate governance generated by state adoption of antitakeover laws to empirically map out managerial preferences we use plant level data and exploit a unique feature of corporate law that allows us to deal with possible biases associated with the timing of the laws we find that when managers are insulated from takeovers worker wages especially those of white collar workers rise the destruction of old plants falls but the creation of new plants also falls finally overall productivity and profitability decline in response to these laws our results suggest that active empire building may not be the norm and that managers may instead prefer to enjoy the quiet life

wage bargaining and monopsony this paper identifies three possible outcomes of higher relative firm bargaining power in a unionized firm facing an upward sloping labor supply curve the conventional regime with reduced wage and higher employment corresponds to firm bargaining power below a certain critical value a supply constrained regime where increased firm bargaining power reduces both wages and employment occurs when the bargaining power is above another critical level a novel result is that we identify a third regime with firm bargaining power between these critical levels where changes in relative bargaining power does not affect wages and employment

dual class ipos a theoretical analysis we consider an incumbent who wishes to sell equity to outsiders at an ipo to implement his firm s project he may be talented lower cost of effort comparative advantage in project implementation or untalented the project may have high intrinsically more valuable but showing less signs of success in the near term or low near term uncertainty under a single class share structure the incumbent has a greater chance of losing control to potential rivals if he undertakes the project with high near term uncertainty since outsiders may vote for the rival if they believe the project is not progressing well a dual class share structure allows the incumbent to have enough votes to prevail against any rival but may be misused by untalented incumbents to dissipate value our results help to explain firms choices between dual class and single class ipos and the post ipo operating performance of dual class versus single class firms

attaching workers through in kind payments theory and evidence from russia external shocks may cause a decline in the productivity of fixed capital in certain regions of an economy exogenous obstacles to migration make it hard for workers in those regions to reallocate to more prosperous regions in addition firms may devise attachment strategies to keep workers from moving out of a local labor market when workers are compensated in kind they find it difficult to raise the cash needed for migration this endogenous obstacle to migration has not yet been considered in the literature the article shows that the feasibility of attachment depends on the inherited structure of local labor markets attachment can exist in equilibrium only if the labor market is sufficiently concentrated attachment is beneficial for both employers and employees but hurts the unemployed and the self employed an analysis of matched household firm data from the russian federation corroborates the theory

dynamic monopsony evidence from a french establishment panel this paper uses a panel of about 6000 french establishments to test some implications of the modern theory of dynamic monopsony or upward sloping labour supply curves for average firm wages panel estimates provide strong evidence of a much larger long run employer size wage effect eswe than found previously while controlling for worker quality and compensating differentials with lagged wages and for profitability rent sharing employment expansion also has a positive effect on wages providing further evidence for upward sloping labour supply as distinct from the effect of shocks in a perfectly competitive labour market

economies of scale in non revenue producing cost centers implications for hospital mergers this paper uses semiparametric methods to estimate the magnitude of economies of scale in 14 non revenue producing cost centers in hospitals there are substantial economies of scale in small hospitals but economies are exhausted in hospitals with over 10 000 discharges annually in recent hospital mergers challenged by federal antitrust agencies one or both hospitals had over 10 000 discharges suggesting that efficiency gains in non revenue producing cost centers will be small and could easily be offset by nominal price increases