the role of air and water residuals for steam electric power generation the decade of the sixties saw increasing concern over the progressive deterioration in environmental quality and in the early seventies major federal legislation established air and water pollution control strategies at the time these laws were enacted information on the costs and benefits of pollution control programs was limited today nearly two decades after the first expressions of concern there remain few neoclassical models of productions that explicitly incorporate residuals as by products of production activities most of the available information on the costs of pollution control policies is based on engineering cost analyses of model plants as a rule these studies estimate costs by considering the increments to production costs associated with adding specific types of capital equipment to reduce emissions to specified levels they often do not consider the full menu of responses possible in meeting a given emission standard equally important they are relevant only for the model plant which formed the basis for the cost calculations the purpose of this paper is to present the results of a neoclassical analysis of the role of a variety of residuals that generally comprise the major air and water emissions of steam generating electric plants our analysis distinguishes plants by vintage of equipment and treats generating capital as a quasi fixed factor thus the results provide a description of the features of the ex post production technology it should of course be acknowledged that a neoclassical production model is an approximate summary of the engineering features of the underlying technology the value of the approach to describing production activities ultimately depends on its ability to authentically describe the features of that technology recent experimental evidence by kopp and smith 25 suggests that neoclassical cost models which ignore constraints on industrial effluents may provide seriously misleading descriptions of the features of the underlying production processes steam electric generating

the competitive effects of vertical agreements for many years there were few distinctions drawn between horizontal and vertical agreements both were considered anticompetitive and subject to per se condemnation under the antitrust laws recently however this approach has come under attack and what was once the conventional wisdom is no longer so indeed there is growing acceptance of the view that vertical agreements can rarely have anticompetitive consequences per se legality would then be the appropriate standard in this paper we investigate the competitive implications of a particular vertical agreement the imposition of exclusive dealing requirements by a manufacturer on his distributors however to maintain the focus of the analysis we do not consider ultimate welfare gains or losses in an early application of economic analysis to this practice aaron director and edward levi 1956 suggest that exclusive dealing would be anticompetitive if it raised entry costs for rivals our object following this conjecture see their p 293 is to examine the market conditions under which exclusive dealing impedes entry howard marvel 1982 dealt with the practice of exclusive dealing he provides an efficiency rationale for exclusive dealing ignores the prospect that anticompetitive effects may follow and concludes that exclusive dealing ought therefore to be treated as legal per se p 25 this paper examines the possible anticompetitive effects neglected by marvel i market conditions for exclusive dealing

a note on multiproduct economies of scale and economies of scope abstract two measures of local economies of scale for a firm producing more than two products are derived using measures of product specific economies of scale and economics of scope the latter is especially useful for econometric estimation and testing

embeddedness cooperation and popular economy firms in the informal sector this paper is motivated by empirical observations on popular economy firms pefs in the informal sector of santiago de chile these are labor managed firms embedded in popular milieu where cooperation between their members plays a central role this paper develops a partial equilibrium microeconomic theory of pefs first it endogeneizes the level of cooperation between the workers second it develops a static and a dynamic model to analyze whether embeddedness influences the behavior of the pef embeddedness is assumed to be captured by three different characteristics suggested by the empirical observations most of them influence the employment and income levels in the pef

economies of scope and the cash crop food crop debate in senegal abstract the government of senegal plans to achieve national food self sufficiency by inducing farmers to switch away from cash crops toward food crop production this paper examines selected economic consequences of the planned substitution using empirical data recently collected in southeastern senegal cost function estimates suggest that farmers are currently producing too much food crop and too little cash crop output given existing technology and observed relative prices moreover economies of scope in producing both food crops and cash crops on the same farm result in a 22 cost saving relative to growing both types of crops on separate specialized farms

determinants of child mortality health and nutrition in a developing country abstract child health and nutrition status are important determinants of adult productivities and earnings and thus are an important channel of intergenerational socioeconomic mobility building upon economic models of household behavior we investigate the determinants of child mortality and health and nutrition status in regions defined by the degree of urbanization in the developing country of nicaragua and offer some policy suggestions our estimates suggest that determinants differ significantly across regions income is not an important factor there is an inverse relation with number of siblings and there are positive associations with calorie intake schooling except in the relatively low income rural areas the availability of refrigeration and the quality of sewage systems

scale of production and choice of technique in the engineering industries in developing countries this article examines the relationship between scale of production optimal choice of technique and costs for three engineering industries nuts and bolts iron founding and machine tools in all three industries costs of production fell as the scale of output increased this was associated with switches of technique and the spread of fixed costs over a larger number of units the capital output ratio fell and labour productivity increased with increases in scale while in most cases the capital labour ratio increased the implications of these findings are briefly discussed

causes of multiproduct production the case of the engineering industries in developing countries abstract concepts developed in recent literature on multiproduct industries are used to explain the absence of vertical and horizontal specialization in the capital goods industries in developing countries diversification of product mix generally occurs as firms seek to capture positive economies of scope due to idle machine capacity it is argued here that in doing so they fail to take account of organizational diseconomies of scope which result from such diversification with growth in market size greater specialization might be expected as economies of scope due to idle machine capacity are eliminated if however domestic prices for the products a firm produces are higher than world prices for those products there will be a continued incentive for diversification rather than specialization

labor markets as gendered institutions equality efficiency and empowerment issues abstract labor markets are gendered institutions operating at the intersection of the productive and reproductive economies participation in labor markets does not automatically empower women reduction in gender differentials in earnings may be the result of harmonizing down rather than up discrimination against women may persist because in the absence of institutional changes it is profitable it is important to distinguish between static and dynamic and micro and macro efficiency labor market regulation has an important role to play in the institutional transformation needed to reconcile goals of efficiency and equality

cost structure and productivity growth in european railway systems the purpose of this paper is threefold first to empirically investigate the coststructure of the railway systems in ten european countries belgium denmark france germany greece italy luxembourg the netherlands portugal and the united kingdom of the european union second to provide measures of economies diseconomies of scale and fully investigate the manner by which economies of scale have affected the cost structure of the system and have been affected by the growth in input prices and technology and third to measure economic efficiency and identify its sources in achieving this purpose the translog technology has been used and the translog model was estimated using time series data covering the period 1969 1993 zellner s iterative method was used in estimating the translog model

the formal structure of a gender segregated low income economy abstract based upon insights drawn from research concerning the nature of the gender based division of labor in agrarian regions of developing countries a formal model is advanced of the interactions that take place in such a setting males are characterized as seeking to maximize their income from production of an exportable cash crop by drawing women out of household social maintenance activities by dint of coercion cooperation and compensation the paper also explores repercussions on the efficiency and output of the social maintenance or subsistence sector due to the loss of female laborpower to the male controlled export sector finally the impact of an international monetary fund mandated currency devaluation on an economy of this type is considered as well

testing for a unit root in the volatility of asset returns it is now well established that the volatility of asset returns is time varying and highly persistent one leading model that is used to represent these features of the data is the stochastic volatility model the researcher may test for non stationarity of the volatility process by testing for a unit root in the log squared time series this strategy for inference has many advantages but is not followed in practice because these unit root tests are known to have very poor size properties in this paper i show that new tests that are robust to negative ma roots allow a reliable test for a unit root in the volatility process to be conducted in applying these tests to exchange rate and stock returns strong rejections of non stationarity in volatility are obtained copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd

big bank mergers in europe an analysis of the cost implications this paper examines the cost implications from hypothetical cross border bank mergers in the eu in light of recent claims that substantial cost savings could be expected as the result of the eu s single market programme for financial services in fact our results suggest only limited opportunities for costs saving from big bank mergers and indicate that such mergers are more likely to result in an increase in total costs while there is a large variation in the simulated cost outcomes the greatest opportunities for cost savings would appear to be generated by mergers between german and italian banks in contrast mergers between french and german banks appear likely to result in substantial cost increases although the overall findings suggest limited benefits from cross border mergers between large banks this may be a reflection of the methodology merger simulations are carried out hypothetically ignoring any prior information about the pairings we assume no premiums or merger costs and no further synergies resulting from such things as branch closures or a restructuring of the product mix these assumptions may cause us to understate the potential reduction in total costs resulting from large bank mergers and therefore our estimates provide the most pessimistic of total cost reduction outcomes in conclusion the substantial variation of cost outcomes generated suggests that large banks seeking economies through cross border mergers should select potential partners with great care

jointly produced exhaustible resources abstract natural resources are often produced jointly from composite ores which in turn are extracted from fixed reserve endowments in this paper market behavior is examined for such resources and it is shown how the price of each resource will depend on its demand and the demands and storage costs for the other resources present in the ore the measurement of resource scarcity is discussed and the effects of uncertainty over future resource demands are examined it is shown that the competitive market will still extract produce and store at socially optimal rates if firms are risk neutral and the average cost of storage is constant policy implications are noted particularly with reference to government stockpiling programs

multiproduct technology and market structure a recent line of research has exposed some technological determinants of the structure of industries that produce more than one good the analyses of both multiproduct perfect competition and natural monopoly require a generalized notion of average cost and in addition several newly identified technological characteristics pertinent only to joint production this paper provides an overview of these new results and suggests a unifying framework in which the theory can be further developed

the poor and the social sectors during a period of macroeconomic adjustment empirical evidence for jamaica considerable uncertainty remains about the human impact of macroeconomic adjustment analysis of the impact of adjustment on the poor and on the social sectors is difficult because it involves evaluating a counterfactual situation in which households are affected by prices incomes and public services with the possibility of substantial substitutions all within an economywide framework with complicated concurrent and lagged interactions time series data for jamaica is utilized in this article to examine whether macroeconomic adjustment initiated in the early 1980s but intensified in 1984 85 was associated with significant deterioration in various indicators of health nutritional and welfare outcomes particularly among the poor although the authors find evidence of substantial cuts in governmental expenditures on social services there is little confirmation of significant short run deterioration in human capital indicators during the adjustment period

financial services and the urban system an exploration financial services have come to represent an increasingly important sector in the economies of developed nations although a substantial literature has accumulated on this topic relatively little attention has been given to the locational aspects of nancial services an attempt is made here to examine the spatial structure of this sector in terms of the urban system drawing on the principles of central place theory the limitations and applicability of which are considered this is followed by a discussion of the salient features of financial services within the overall urban system after describing the differentiation of financial services in frequency terms the hierarchical structure of the uk urban system is outlined these two aspects are then related in order to demonstrate the ordered nature of the spatial structure of financial services there follows a brief discussion of the findings and their implications for future work

scale and scope economies in the multi product banking firm abstract the multi product nature of the banking firm is examined utilizing the translog cost function this analysis indicates that contrary to conventional wisdom natural monopoly scale economies and product specific decreasing costs are not robust characterizations of the banking industry there is however evidence that the cost function is characterized by economies of scope the implications of these results are discussed and extensions of this approach suggested

the technological determinants of the u s energy industry structure recent theoretical developments on multiproduct firm costs have increased our understanding of these firms yet to date empirical analysis of the relationship between multiproduct firm costs and industry structure has been limited in this paper the multiproduct nature of us energy producers is explicitly recognized and a multiproduct cost function estimated for the industry the empirical results indicate that the multiproduct structure of large energy firms has at least in part been motivated by economies of scope between petroleum and coal operations 27 references 19 footnotes 3 figures 1 table

the economic lives of the poor in what turned out to be a rhetorical master move the 1990 world development report from the world bank defined the extremely poor people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than 1 per day per person measured at the 1985 purchasing power parity ppp exchange rate in 1993 the poverty line was updated to 1 08 per person per day at the 1993 ppp exchange rate which is the line we use in this paper poverty lines have always existed indeed 1 per day was chosen in part because of its proximity to the poverty lines used by many poor countries 1 however the 1 a day poverty line has come to dominate the conversations about poverty to a remarkable extent

gender awareness in modeling structural adjustment abstract the macroeconomic models underpinning the design of structural adjustment programs are gender blind this paper discusses strategies for introducing gender analysis into these models and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the models from a gender perspective it concludes that besides being blind to gender the models are also blind to the waste of resources and impoverishment that stems from deficient aggregate demand undemocratic decision making and directly unproductive expenditures that buttress male power this waste is however likely to be diminished by moves to more egalitarian systems of gender relations entailing changes in the structure of entitlements and the social matrix in which macroeconomic processes are embedded

economics of scale and scope in multiproduct firms evidence from us railroads recently there has been a surge of interest in analysing scale economies in us railroad firms the analysis of scale economies in existing studies is however limited in view of recent advances in the theory of the multiproduct firm in this paper the previous work is extended to address the issue of scale and scope economies in multiproduct firms the findings show that us railroads experience mild overall economies of scale but rather marked product specific economies of scale with respect to both freight and passenger services however there appear to be diseconomies of scope associated with the joint production of the two services based on these results this study indicates that us railroad firms would have no tendency to behave as a natural monopoly in the absence of regulation

economies of scope within market frameworks abstract the purpose of this paper is to look at the circumstances under which a market organised to take advantage of economies of scope is superior to one neglecting these but as a consequence involving less monopoly power the question is investigated theoretically by means of two simple models in order to obtain insights into the main forces involved it transpires that if cross elasticities of demand are low relative to own price elasticities then gaining economies of scope is likely to be worthwhile from society s viewpoint otherwise not

gender mainstreaming in finance ministries abstract ministries of finance appear largely to have escaped careful scrutiny in attempts to sensitize different divisions of government to gender concerns this paper shows three possible points of entry to engendering the work of ministries of finance at the level of ongoing macroeconomic management which includes the annual budget of the government and the fiscal deficit external and internal debt and the balance of payments at the level of structural reforms particularly deregulation liberalization and privatization which are intended to improve efficient resource use and eradicate poverty and in the specific context of credit liberalization and the provision of micro credit

supply response in an agrarian economy with non symmetric gender relations abstract there is a growing recognition that gender relations matter for supply response to devaluation and other structural adjustment policies in sub saharan africa but most household models that introduce gender differentiation nevertheless preserve an essential symmetry between male and female household members and do not capture elements of subordination or coercion in male female relations this paper seeks to contribute by developing a model based on stackelberg type equations in which the husband occupies the position of firstmover reflecting his power to set the parameters for women s choices the model is contextualized with reference to tanzania

adjustment with a human face evidence from jamaica summary in september 1991 jamaica liberalized its exchange rate as part of its structural adjustment program sap the sudden and steep devaluation associated with this policy move had serious repercussions for real purchasing power poverty general inflation and food prices especially staple foods such as rice and flour which are imported this study evaluates the social cost of the liberalization policy by examining the behavior of preschool childrens weight for height or wasting an indicator of nutritional status that is sensitive to short term fluctuations in living conditions using 8 years of national microsurvey data for 1989 96 we apply synthetic cohort analysis to disentangle the separate impacts of childs age date of birth and measurement date on weight for height estimates based on an exhaustive set of controls indicate that children weighed in the aftermath of the policy november and december 1991 are significantly lighter by 0 178 z scores than children weighed just a few months later and children in urban areas were especially affected when food price inflation is explicitly entered into the model it is highly statistically significant and reduces but only slightly the effect of being measured at the end of 1991 the calculated elasticity of weight for height z score with respect to food price inflation is a very high 0 86 during the rapid economic reform in 1991 this elasticity rose to 1 24 indicating a large response of weight for height to food price inflation as is to be expected in a small open economy 2003 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

the political economy of women s budgets in the south abstract soon after the democratic elections of 1994 south africa embarked on its first women s budget exercise a collaborative venture between nongovernmental organizations and the south african parliament some time later the south african government initiated its own exercise in gender analysis of the budget the south african initiative has attracted a lot of interest from around the world in a number of other countries governments and civil society players have embarked on gender analysis exercises often with strong support from international donors this paper discusses the ways in which these exercises can assist in addressing gender issues as well as some of the tensions involved

will developing country nutrition improve with income a case study for rural south india aggregate estimates of food expenditure are consistent with such a possibility implying income expenditure elasticities close to one however the high degree of aggregation at which such estimates are made means that the considerable increase in price per nutrient as income increases is ignored and the nutrient elasticities are therefore overstated estimates for a rural south indian sample indicate that this bias is considerable and that the true nutrient elasticities with respect to income may be close to zero

gender markets and states a selective review and research agenda abstract this paper attempts to define a research agenda that will explore the relationships among gender markets and states taking account of the recent and continuing processes of market liberalization regionalization and transformation of the relations between states and societies it argues that in order to understand what market liberalization or the formation of regional economic blocs might mean for women one needs to look beyond market activity per se to nonmarket activity and to women s wellbeing more generally it selectively reviews some of the literature on structural adjustment and regional trading blocs in order to clarify underlying concepts and point to new directions for empirical research in the penultimate section it raises a set of policy and research questions on the role that women s non governmental organizations can play in shaping the emerging relationships between governments and the private sector

on the mutuality of interest between bureaus and high demand review committees the case of joint production if we combine my result with those of niskanen and mackay weaver we have three necessary conditions for interests to be mutual first review committees are composed of high demanders of their bureau s outputs the committee seeks to maximize the interests of the group it represents subject to majority approval of the full legislature second the ideal point of the committee must not be too extreme in terms of mix finally the multiproduct bureau must be the least cost institution for public supply of the services in the sense that joint production is efficient for the review committee interested in two or more outputs if any of these does not hold the interests of the bureau and its review committee diverge the incentives for the bureau to expand across outputs without regard to efficiency means that in general we could expect the bureau to perceive the review committee as an adversary because for the committee efficiency in production is an important consideration what are the implications of this result there must exist an optimal structure for bureaucratic production of services further there exist substantial incentives for discovering and implementing this structure when legislators create bureaus diseconomies of scope imply separate bureaus are better economies of scope the opposite if committees optimally structure the bureaucracy in accordance with this result they ensure that interests do not diverge so we see that the initial design of bureaucratic organization may be more important than was previously recognized and calls for closer examination

an empirical study of joint production and scale economies in commercial banking this paper utilizes the translog cost function to test the proposition that the bank productionfunction is characterized by jointness the cross section analysis for the years 1973 through 1978 indicates that bank production is in fact characterized by jointness this result calls into question the findings and implications of studies that utilize the assumption of non jointness in production since virtually all of the major bank cost studies employ the assumption of nonjointness the second part of our analysis examines scale economies for the banking firm while allowing for jointness in production our estimates indicate that scale economies characterize bank production at only small bank sizes and that the cost structure of large banks is characterized by diseconomies of scale

long term trends in the world economy the gender dimension abstract this paper considers the implications of long term trends in the international economy for the relative employment and income of men and women in developed and developing countries we find that given a persistent gender division of labor mass unemployment in the north is due to different forces operating on men and women the rate of growth of men s jobs has fallen because of deindustrialization but men have not withdrawn from the labor force at a comparable rate women have been entering the labor force in feminized jobs at a faster rate than they have been created in the south women have largely taken traditionally feminized jobs in the labor intensive export oriented growing manufacturing sectors in latin america entry has been largely in the service sector men have been losing jobs in agriculture and domestic manufacturing the paper proposes that the optimal solution to the mass unemployment problem in the north as well as in the south and the apparent competition for jobs between the north and the south and between men and women lies in achieving a trend increase in the growth rate of oecd and world aggregate demand and output but such a trend rise in the long term rate of growth of demand would only be possible if there were new cooperative institutional arrangements within and between countries in such arrangements women need to have an important independent role

scale economies and existence of sustainable monopoly prices abstract the size of the firm relative to market demand is crucial to a determination of whether there exist sustainable monopoly prices in the one product case the size of the firm is its minimum efficient scale in the multiproduct case size is defined by a set of outputs at which cost complementarities are present the analysis shows that when the size of the firm is sufficiently large there exist anonymously equitable aumann shapley prices further at these prices natural monopoly is sustainable against rival entry the aumann shapley price are also shown to be quantity sustainable in the sense of brock and scheinkman

popular economy in santiago de chile state of affairs and challenges do informal initiatives share a capitalist spirit of entrepreneurship this article attempts to answer this question using a popular economy analytical framework and focusing on the case of chile first we present the context of the research namely the economic and political evolutions in chile since the 1970s and their effects on the popular economy then we seek to answer the original question relying on in depth case studies of so called popular economy organizations our research shows that their socio economic logics significantly differ from those of the traditional capitalist firm our observations also suggest important differences between current and older initiatives 2014 elsevier ltd

a space time random field model for electricity forward prices abstract stochastic models for forward electricity prices are of great relevance nowadays given the major structural changes in the market due to the increase of renewable energy in the production mix in this study we derive a spatio temporal dynamical model based on the heath jarrow morton hjm approach under the musiela parametrization which ensures an arbitrage free model for electricity forward prices the model is fitted to a unique data set of historical price forward curves as a particular feature of the model we disentangle the temporal from spatial maturity effects on the dynamics of forward prices and shed light on the statistical properties of risk premia of the noise volatility term structure and of the spatio temporal noise correlation structures we find that the short term risk premia oscillates around zero but becomes negative in the long run we identify the samuelson effect in the volatility term structure and volatility bumps explained by market fundamentals furthermore we find evidence for coloured noise and correlated residuals which we model by a hilbert space valued normal inverse gaussian levy process with a suitable covariance functional

production technology costs and multiproduct industry structure an application of the long run profit function to the new england fishing industry the long run multiproduct profit function is developed to provide a more general procedure than the static minimum cost function to examine the technological and cost determinants of multiproduct industry structure and the likely form of any market equilibrium in this approach outputs are endogenous and the long run equilibrium levels of quasi fixed factors are endogenously determined the multiproduct structure of the multispecies new england fishing industry and the likely multi

agricultural incentives in developing countries measuring the effect of sectoral and economywide policies the impact of sector specific direct and economywide indirect policies on agricultural incentives for 18 developing countries for the period 1975 84 are estimated the direct effect is measured by the proportional difference between the producer price and the border price adjusting for distribution storage transport and other marketing costs the indirect effect has two components 1 the impact of the unsustainable portion of the current account deficit and of industrial protection policies on the real exchange rate and thus on the price of agricultural commodities relative to nonagricultural nontradables and 2 the impact of industrial protection policies on the relative price of agricultural commodities to that of nonagricultural tradable goods the authors found that a in almost all cases the direct effect is equivalent to a tax on exportable goods and to a subsidy for importables b the indirect effect also taxes agriculture and dominates the direct effect and c the direct policies for both importables and exportables stabilize domestic producer prices

the gender dimensions of economic adjustment policies potential interactions and evidence to date abstract many developing countries have implemented stabilization and structural adjustment programs over the last 20 years the success of these programs depends critically on individual level responses to changing economic incentives access to control of and an ability to move productive economic resources between sectors is determined in part by gender if an individual s gender impedes their ability to fully participate in the economic adjustment process by inhibiting resource access control or movement adjustment will be impaired this paper discusses the potential gender dimensions of structural adjustment policies and examines the evidence to dale

the effect of business interdependencies on product r d intensive business performance one of the major decisions that firms face regarding r d intensive businesses is a structural one establishing the appropriate level of internal strategic interdependency within and among business units the current discussion over the effectiveness of creating small independent and entrepreneurial venture units in multi business corporations is part of this larger structural concern the aim of the present research is to study the efficacy of different structural linkages for achieving market share and roi objectives in product r d intensive businesses the study focuses on interdependencies between business units in product r d intensive businesses that produce consumer products or industrial products a sample of 641 businesses 221 consumer products and 420 industrial goods is drawn from the pims data base a cluster analysis is run to identify natural groups of homogeneous businesses for each of the seven identified groups established suppliers fast movers high tech job shops stalled giants established diversifiers dominant specialists and laggers a multi way analysis of variance is performed to study the influence of various interdependencies measured in term of vertical integration shared facilities and shared marketing on two criteria of performance market share and roi the findings indicate first that the interdependencies required to achieve high performance are contingent upon the nature of the product r d intensive business and its environmental characteristics second for a given business configuration high performance interdependencies are influenced by the type of performance objectives selected by the business such as market share or profitability finally the results imply that a multi business corporation which possesses a portfolio of product r d intensive businesses probably requires a more diverse set of interdependencies than for example simply mainstream centralized industrial r d organization on the one hand and independent entrepreneurial units on the other hand effective competition for a firm with diverse r d intensive businesses may often call for a capability to support concurrently multiple levels of internal interdependencies and to reject create or modify this set of interdependencies as the situation warrants

risk pooling and intermediate trading agents this paper argues that intermediate trading agents itas besides providing services like the service of availability and information economizing activity serve another important role which is to provide producing firms with a vehicle to shift forward their retailing risks of unsold products the gains from trade from intermediation as risk bearers need not beg arbitrary assumptions that itas compared to firms must have better information regarding consumer demands or less costly retailing technologies neither does it necessarily rely on the assumption that itas are inherently less risk averse rather risk pooling via product diversification by itas under plausible conditions is sufficient to provide the profit incentive for intermediation for such insurance service producing firms pay risk premia embedded in price discounts which increase or decrease with bulk orders of itas depending on whether firms have increasing or decreasing returns to scale production technologies respectively la mise en commun des risques et les intermediaires commerciaux ce memoire sugg re que les interm6diaires commerciaux en plus de produire des services de disponibilite et une activite qui reduit les coats de l information peuvent aussi constituer un moyen pour les entreprises productrices de transferer les risques de produits invendus vers leur client le ou leurs agents pour que les intermediaires commerciaux jouent ce role et que des gains soient engendr6s par cette activite d interm6diation il n est pas n6cessaire de postuler que les intermediaires ont des renseignements plus clairs quant a la demande des consommateurs ou qu ils ont acc s a des technologies de mise en march6 moins cofiteuses ou que ces intermediaires ont moins de repugnance pour le risque il suffit que les intermediaires puissent esperer faire des profits par ces operations d intermediation en mettant en commun certains risques par une diversification de leurs activit6s pour obtenir cette sorte de service d assurance les entreprises productrices vont etre pretes h consentir des escomptes de prix qui vont croitre ou d6croitre a proportion que les commandes des intermediaires commerciaux prennent des dimensions plus importantes selon que les entreprises productrices ont des technologies dont les rendements h l echelle sont croissants ou decroissants the author is grateful to joel fried and john palmer for useful comments and discussions many thanks are also due to keizo nagatani and the anonymous referees for helpful suggestions to improve on an earlier version canadian journal of economics revue canadienne d economique xiv no 2 may mai 1981 printed in canada imprime au canada 0008 4085 81 0000 0261 01 50 1981 canadian economics association this content downloaded from 157 55 39 208 on fri 29 jul 2016 04 21 50 utc all use subject to http about jstor org terms

uncertainty and export performance evidence from 18 countries we study a sample of nine developed and nine developing countries to evaluate the questions of how foreign income uncertainty and real exchange rate rer uncertainty impact international trade and how those impacts vary according to stage of development rer uncertainty has a negative and significant impact on export growth for six of the nine less developed countries in our sample while it has an insignificant effect for a majority of the developed countries in both groups foreign income uncertainty has a more pervasively significant and frequently larger influence on trade than does rer uncertainty

infrastructure investment and canadian manufacturing productivity this paper examines the relationship between canadian public infrastructure and private output using a constant elasticity and substitution translog ces tl cost model to describe the interaction of the public and private sectors the ces tl was first specified by pollak et al 1984 we find public capital a substitute for private capital within the canadian manufacturing sector additionally the services of public capital enhance the productivity of private capital canadian manufacturing costs are characterized by economies of scale indicating that less than optimal plant sizes dominated canadian manufacturing sector during the study period advances in disembodied technical progress are also indicated

towards an economic theory of the multiproduct firm this paper outlines a theory of the multiproduct firm important building blocks include excess capacity and its creation market imperfections and the peculiarities of organizational knowledge including its fungible and taut character a framework is adopted in which profit seeking firms are seen to diversify in order to avoid the high transactions costs associated with using various markets to trade the services of various specialized assets neoclassical explanations of the multiproduct firm are shown to be seriously deficient

economies of scale and scope in thrift institutions the case of finnish cooperative and savings banks accounting data on operating costs and outputs for cooperative and savings banks in 1983 and 1984 are used to provide empirical evidence on the cost structure of thrift institutions in finland a modified translog cost model is fitted to the data economies of scale and scope are estimated based on the coefficients of the cost model using advances and bills as outputs the results indicate that cost curves for both cooperative banks and savings banks generally tend to be l shaped at the plant level and u shaped at the firm level scope diseconomies are found in the joint production of advances and bills this evidenceindicates that natural monopoly conditions are not present in the finnish thrift industry