bidding behavior in the longer term refinancing operations of the european central bank evidence from a panel sample selection model abstract this paper analyzes individual bidding data of the longer term refinancing operations ltros of the european central bank we investigate how banks bidding behavior is related to a series of exogenous variables including collateral costs interest rate expectations market volatility and to individual bank characteristics like country of origin size and experience a specific feature of these auctions is that the number and composition of bidders varies over time therefore we estimate panel sample selection models to control for a bank s endogenous participation decision we find that bidding strategies depend on the banks attributes yet different bidding behavior generally does not translate into differences concerning bidder success there is evidence for the winner s curse effect in ltros indicating a common value component in banks demand for longer term refinancing

optimizing multinomial logit profit functions the multinomial logit model is a standard approach for determining the probability of purchase in product line problems when the purchase probabilities are multiplied by product contribution margins the resulting profit function is generally nonconcave because of this standard nonlinear search procedures may terminate at a local optimum which is far from the global optimum we present a simple procedure designed to alleviate this problem the key idea of this procedure is to find a path of prices from the global optimum of a related but concave logit profit function to the global optimum of the true but nonconcave logit profit function

distributional effects of a carbon tax on car fuels in france this paper analyses the distributional effects of alternative scenarios of carbon taxes on car fuels using disaggregated french panel data from 2003 to 2006 it incorporates household price responsiveness that differs across income groups into a consumer surplus measure of tax burden carbon taxation is regressive before revenue recycling however taking into account the benefits from congestion reduction induced by the tax mitigates regressivity we show also that recycling additional revenues from the carbon tax either in equal amounts to each household or according to household size makes poorest households better off

pollution control and the ramsey problem pollution is an inevitable by product of production and is only gradually dissolved by the environment it can be reduced by producing less and by cleaning up the environment but neither occur when they are left to the market cleaning activities and the optimal emission charges increase with the stock of pollutants when one allows for pollution of the environment in the classical ramsey problem the capital stock is less than in the market outcome and a fortiori less than under the golden rule the analysis distinguishes between stock and flow externalities arising from pollution an increase in impatience can lead to more capital accumulation even though this leaves less room for current consumption

habit formation interdependent preferences and demographic effects in the almost ideal demand system the authors model myopic habit formation interdependence of preferences among consumers and demographic effects as taste shifters in a micro consumer demand model of the almost ideal demand variety the model is estimated for dutch micro data the authors investigate the dynamic properties of the model and find that it behaves very differently from models without interdependence of preferences the implications for micro macro modeling are discussed copyright 1991 by royal economic society

imperfect competition expectations and the multiple effects of monetary growth in a monetary overlapping generations model with an imperfectly competitive labor market in which output is below its full employment level it is shown that different backward looking rules for forecasting inflation lead to different steady states despite yielding no forecast errors in the steady state and in many cases none in the short or medium run either higher monetary growth raises output in some steady states in others has no effect and in others lowers it this contrasts with ad hoc or competitive macromodels where the absence of forecast errors in the steady state usually defines it and its properties uniquely copyright 1992 by royal economic society

pricing risk adjusted deposit insurance an option based model this paper presents a methodology for arriving at empirical estimates of deposit insurance premiums from market data by using isomorphic relationships betweeen equity and a call option and insurance and a put option the data utilizes the market value of equity to solve for the asset value and its volatility market perceptions of fdic bailout policies are explicitly modeled so as to eliminate the bias in inverted values of assets and their volatility sensitivity analyses are performed to show that rank orderings based on premiums are robust to changes in specification thus facilitating allocation of aggregate premium across banks while economists have long argued in favor of risk adjusted deposit insurance as both more equitable and more efficient than the current system of flatrate premiums various recent developments have further contributed to an increasing dissatisfaction with the current system first both the banking industry and the government seem to be tending to the view that deregulation of the banking industry would be necessary in order to meet more sophisticated future demands on the industry as well as desirable as a policy means of stimulating greater competition among banks moreover a sudden rise in the incidence of bank failures 1 and the vulnerability of the u s banks to the socalled international debt crisis have served to bring to the fore concern about the health of the banking industry in the absence of deposit insurance riskier banks will be able to attract deposits only at higher rates and these higher costs of funding serve as built in market regulated incentives to limit excessive risk taking by banks as introduction of deposit insurance makes deposits equally risk free across banks these incentives disappear and regulation and close supervision of the banking industry must necessarily replace them as deterrents to excessive risk taking thus when insurance is offered at a flat premium regulation is designed to ensure that the risk posed to the insurer both asset and financial risk is appropriately uniform

exploration during turbulent times an analysis of the relation between cooperation in innovation activities and radical innovation performance during the economic crisis this article investigates the relation between cooperation in innovation activities and innovation before and during the last economic recession we find that cooperation in innovation activities has a stronger relation with radical innovation performance during the economic recession than before this being true irrespectively of whether the partners are national or international this benefit from cooperation during the economic turmoil is higher in the case of firms having different types of partners simultaneously we also find that past cooperation in innovation activities is positively associated to innovation performance during the crisis

budget constraint prices as preference changing parameters of generalized fechner thurstone direct utility functions let v x be any direct utility function characterizing consumer preferences that are reflexive transitive and complete and whose parameters are fixed relative to the usual linear budget constraint p x m here x designates the vector x1 x and is confined to the positive n orthant xi designates quantity of the ith commodity p is the vector p pn of positive commodity prices and m designates total expenditure let x p m designate the system of demand functions derived from v x subject to px m which possess the properties of zero degree homogeneity symmetry and semidefinite negativity let w x 0 designate a direct utility function with a parameter vector 0 dependent on the price vector p that appears in the budget constraint and b that rationalizes the same system of demand functions as v x namely x p m probably many economists who have considered price dependent preferences would conjecture that every such price dependent utility function w x p satisfying a and b is of the rather restricted form

an empirical model of labor supply in a life cycle setting this paper formulates and estimates a structural intertemporal model of labor supply using theoretical characterizations derived from an economic model of lifetime behavior a two step empirical analysis yields estimates of intertemporal and uncompensated substitution effects which provide the information needed to predict the response of hours of work to life cycle wage growth and shifts in the lifetime wage path

independence of irrelevant alternatives and revealed group preferences it is shown that a pareto optimal and continuous single valued choice function defined on the compact convex subsets of the positive orthant of the n dimensional euclidean space maximizes a real valued function if and only if it satisfies the independence of irrelevant alternatives condition if n 2 and the strong axiom of revealed preference otherwise the results can be applied to consumer demand theory to deal with nonlinear budget sets and to bargaining game theory to generalize the nash bargaining solution

disposable income unemployment inflation and state spending in a dynamic political economic model this paper formulates a medium term macroeconomic model of disposable income unemployment inflation and state spending proposes a theory of qualitative choice to explain electoral popularity in terms of these variables and develops three approaches to the formulation of political economic policy the first approach is static sets the tax rate to reconcile the interests of various pressure groups and yields a political trade off between the private and public sector the second approach relies on maximizing the probability of winning the next election and gives rise to a political business cycle unless the electorate votes strategically the implications of crowding out of private investment under alternative monetary rules autonomous behaviour of the state bureaucracy and tax indexation for the political business cycle are also examined the third approach analyzes the objective of maximizing the uninterrupted length in office it yields a short run political cycle superimposed on a longer cycle

alternating bid bargaining with a smallest money unit abstract in a seminal paper ariel rubinstein has shown that impatience implies determinateness of the two person bargaining problem in this note we show that this result depends also on the assumption that the set of alternatives is a continuum if the pie can be divided only in finitely many different ways for example because the pie is an amount of money and there is a smallest money unit any partition can be obtained as the result of a subgame perfect equilibrium if the time interval between successive offers is sufficiently small we also show that for a fixed discount rate all subgame perfect equilibrium payoffs of the discrete game converge to the solution obtained by rubinstein if the smallest money unit tends to zero

fickle capital flows and retrenchment evidence from bilateral banking data abstract we empirically examine the response of cross border capital flows to economic uncertainty using bilateral banking flow data we show that while banks reduce their exposure to a foreign country when it becomes more risky they tend to increase their exposure to their home country in bad times a retrenchment to further understand this puzzle we examine how the differential response to foreign and domestic uncertainty is affected by country specific characteristics bilateral characteristics and crises our analysis suggests that most of the current theories based on either information asymmetries between foreign and domestic investors or institutional risk cannot explain bilateral data well on the other hand our results show that global crises have an asymmetric impact on the risk attitudes of banking institutions towards country specific uncertainty global crises make investors more risk averse towards foreign uncertainty but have no effect on the responsiveness to domestic uncertainty

international policy coordination in interdependent monetary economies abstract an optimising equilibrium model of two interdependent monetary economies with no other assets except cash perfect foresight flexible exchange rates and imperfect substitution between home and foreign goods is analysed both non cooperative and cooperative market oriented outcomes are time inconsistent since each government has an incentive to renege and levy a surprise inflation tax international policy coordination without pre commitment can be counterproductive even though there are no tax distortions and the provision of public goods is optimal since it exacerbates the credibility problems perceived by the private sectors and therefore leads to a too low level of real money balances and excessive inflation

seasonal adjustment in a market for female agricultural workers this article explores seasonal adjustment in the market for temporary agricultural labor we estimate a model of participation allowing for unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity selection bias using daily observations from chilean panel data and a model of daily earnings results indicate that seasonal wage variation is an important aspect of labor market adjustment contributing to a large change in labor force participation the labor force participation rate of women is significantly more elastic to changes in the expected wage than is that for men nonetheless we find evidence of substantial open unemployment during the slack season especially for females probably due to frictional and efficiency wage effects

alternative bankruptcy prediction models using option pricing theory abstract we examine the empirical properties of the theoretical black scholes merton bsm bankruptcy model we evaluate the predictive ability of various existing modifications of the bsm model and extend prior studies by estimating volatility directly from market observable returns on firm value we show that parsimonious models using our direct market observable volatility estimate perform better than alternative more sophisticated models our findings suggest the adoption of simpler modelling approaches relying on market data when implementing the bsm model

a constructive approach to estimating pure characteristics demand models with pricing discrete choice demand models are important and fundamental tools for understanding consumers choice behavior and for analyzing firms operations and pricing strategies in these models products are often described as a vector of observed characteristics a consumer chooses the product that maximizes her utility assumed to be a function of the observed product characteristics and the consumer s preference over these product characteristics one central task in the demand estimation literature is to infer based on observed data consumers preferences on product characteristics we consider such an estimation problem for pure characteristics models a class of random coefficients demand models without the idiosyncratic logit error term in a consumer s utility function the absence of the logit error term and the use of numerical integration to approximate the integral in aggregate market shares lead to a nonsmooth formulation of approximated market share equations as a result solving the approximated

renegotiation proof equilibria in repeated prisoners dilemma abstract in this note it is shown that the requirement of weak renegatiation proofness does not eliminate any subgame perfect equilibrium outcome of the repeated prisoner s dilemma specifically it is demonstrated that when players are sufficiently patient any feasible and individually rational outcome can be sustained by means of an equilibrium in which the punishing player always profits by carrying out the punishment

structural identification of high and low investment regimes abstract we propose a structural model to investigate the existence and possible differences between low and high regimes of investment expenditures in equipment at the firm level the existence of such differences is predicted by recent theoretical studies of investment behavior stressing the role of asymmetries and non convexities in the adjustment cost technology the structural spike model is estimated for a balanced panel of dutch firms operating in 13 different industrial sectors the flexibility of the structural approach explains why the proposed method outperforms models applying ad hoc spike definitions often encountered in the empirical literature of lumpy investments

limit theorems for estimating the parameters of differentiated product demand systems we provide an asymptotic distribution theory for a class of generalized method of moments estimators that arise in the study of dierentiated product markets when the number of observations is associated with the number of products within a given market we allow for three sources of error sampling error in estimating market shares simulation error in approximating the shares predicted by the model and the underlying model error it is shown that the estimators are can provided the size of the consumer sample and the number of simulation draws grow at a large enough rate relative to the number of products we consider the implications of the results for berry levinsohn and pakes 1995 random coecient logit model and the pure characteristic model analyzed in berry and pakes 2002 the required rates dier for these two frequently used demand models a small monte carlo study shows that the dierence in asymptotic properties of the two models are reflected in quite a striking way in the models small sample properties moreover the limit distributions provide a good approximation to the actual monte carlo distribution of the parameter estimates the results have important implications for the computational burden of the two models

panel estimates of the canadian rural urban women s wage gap this article analyzes the female rural urban wage gap in canada using longitudinal data from the survey of labour and income dynamics 1993 96 we estimate a two step wage equation accounting for unobserved heterogeneity and sample selection the results indicate that a statistically and economically significant rural urban wage gap remains after controlling for observed and unobserved characteristics further the results suggest this rural urban wage difference is not simply induced by immobility between rural and urban markets rather consistent with the effect of thinner rural labor markets the evidence indicates that rural urban differences in the impact of a number of explanatory variables are significant

costs of a practice based air quality regulation dairy farms in the san joaquin valley facing the difficulty of accurately measuring pollution from agriculture economists have recommended regulatory approaches using proxies such as management practices to reduce agricultural pollution using farm level cost data on a panel of dairy farms i estimate the effects of a practice based air quality regulation for dairy farms in the san joaquin valley in california as opposed to ex ante analyses my econometric results indicate that the air quality regulation has not significantly affected the total costs of milk production estimates also suggest that the regulation might have differential effects on different elements of costs i support the econometric findings with evidence on how dairy farms comply with the regulation calculated adoption rates of different pollution mitigation practices using administrative data reveal that dairy farms have mainly adopted labor intensive practices to comply with the regulation

revenue management under a general discrete choice model of consumer behavior customer choice behavior such as buy up and buy down is an important phenomenon in a wide range of revenue management contexts yet most revenue management methodologies ignore this phenomenon or at best approximate it in a heuristic way in this paper we provide an exact and quite general analysis of this problem specifically we analyze a single leg reserve management problem in which the buyers choice behavior is modeled explicitly the choice model is very general simply specifying the probability of purchase for each fare product as a function of the set of fare products offered the control problem is to decide which subset of fare products to offer at each point in time we show that the optimal policy for this problem has a quite simple form namely it consists of identifying an ordered family of efficient subsets s 1 s m and at each point in time opening one of these sets s k where the optimal index k is increasing in the remaining capacity x and decreasing in the remaining time that is the more capacity or less time available the further the optimal set is along this sequence we also show that the optimal policy is a nested allocation policy if and only if the sequence of efficient sets is nested that is s 1 s 2 s m moreover we give a characterization of when nesting by fare order is optimal we also develop an estimation procedure for this setting based on the expectation maximization em method that jointly estimates arrival rates and choice model parameters when no purchase outcomes are unobservable numerical results are given to illustrate both the model and estimation procedure

measuring consumerwelfareinthe cpu market anapplication of the pure characteristics demand model in this article i estimate demand for the personal computer central processing unit and measure consumer welfare using the pure characteristics demand model the model is based on a quasilinear utility function with multiplicative random variables and does not have the idiosyncratic logit error term so that consumer welfare directly reflects consumers valuation of product characteristics welfare calculations show that consumer surplus comprises approximately 90 of total social surplus and that large welfare gains have resulted from the introduction of new products

keynesian and new classical models of unemployment revisited several keynesian and new classical models of unemployment for the united states are reevaluated the models are examined for adequacy by testing the cross equation restrictions where appropriate and using diagnostic and nonnested tests that explicitly recognize the problem introduced by generated regressors the best new classical model for the 1946 73 period is found to be adequate when it is estimated over the 1946 85 period whereas the keynesian model is not existing results of tests obtained at the single equation level ignoring generated regressors are not always supported when the test statistics are calculated using the correct covariance matrix or maximum likelihood copyright 1991 by royal economic society

a discrete choice model with social interactions with an application to high school teen behavior we develop an empirical discrete choice interaction model with a finite number of agents we characterize its equilibrium properties in particular the correspondence between interaction strength number of agents and the set of equilibria and propose to estimate the model by means of simulation methods in an empirical application we analyze the individual behavior of high school teenagers in almost 500 school classes from 70 schools in our baseline model endogenous social interaction effects are strong for behavior closely related to school truancy somewhat weaker for behavior partly related to school smoking cell phone ownership and moped ownership and absent for behavior far away from school asking parents permission for purchases intra gender interactions are generally much stronger than cross gender interactions in a model with school specific fixed effects social interaction effects are insignificant with the exception of intra gender interactions for truancy copyright c 2007 john wiley sons ltd

urban effects on participation and wages are there gender differences abstract this paper estimates participation and wage equations using panel data from the united kingdom to explore gender differences in urban wage and participation premiums the results suggest a small but economically significant urban participation premium for women but none for men results from the wage estimations suggest that after controlling for sample selectivity observed and unobserved heterogeneity the urban premium is larger for women this wage premium is also larger for married or cohabiting women relative to others there is also evidence of higher urban returns to experience for men and lower urban wage depreciation for both men and women

rational habit formation abstract this paper discusses consumer demand under rational habit formation if consumer tastes change endogenously through habit stocks depending on past consumption the rational consumer will make allowance of the future habit forming effects of current consumption a model with rational habit formation is made formally equivalent to an intertemporal consumer model without habit formation by redefining the cost of consumption and wealth the cost of consumption is obtained by adding the cost of future induced consumption to the rental price of the commodity the extended wealth concept is obtained by subtracting the cost of the initial stocks of habits and the cost of future physically necessary consumption from wealth the paper also investigates the implication of rational habit formation for constructing one period cost of living indices

trade reform policy uncertainty and the current account a non expected utility approach rapid and comprehensive reduction in barriers to international trade has often been followed by a sharp deterioration in the current account the macroeconomic counterpart of the deterioration has typically been a decline in private savings no clear response pattern has been observed for private investment this article observes anticipated policy reversal may explain a decline in private savings for the same reason gradual tariff reduction causes private savings to go up temporarily low tariffs lower the relative price of current goods in terms of future goods and thus tend to depress private savings an anticipated future tariff increase will increase current consumption if the intertemporal substitution elasticity is larger than 1 if consumers internalize the impact of future tariff revenues on their after tax income the savings impact will always be negative even for an intertemporal substitution elasticity below 1 in the standard expected utility approach risk aversion is low when intertemporal substitution is high because the relevant elasticities are each other s inverse

an analysis of sample attrition in panel data the michigan panel study of income dynamics by 1989 the michigan panel study on income dynamics psid had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership we study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the estimates of several sets of regression coefficients we provide a statistical framework for conducting tests for attrition bias that draws a sharp distinction between selection on unobservables and on observables and that shows that weighted least squares can generate consistent parameter estimates when selection is based on observables even when they are endogenous our empirical analysis shows that attrition is highly selective and is concentrated among lower socioeconomic status individuals we also show that attrition is concentrated among those with more unstable earnings marriage and migration histories nevertheless we find that these variables explain very little of the attrition in the sample and that the selection that occurs is moderated by regression to the mean effects from selection on transitory components that fade over time consequently despite the large amount of attrition we find no strong evidence that attrition has seriously distorted the representativeness of the psid through 1989 and considerable evidence that its cross sectional representativeness has remained roughly intact

nonresponse in panel data the impact on estimates of a life cycle consumption function if missing observations in a panel data set are not missing at random many widely applied estimators may be inconsistent in this paper we examine empirically several ways to reveal the nature and severity of the selectivity problem due to nonresponse as well as a number of methods to estimate the resulting models using a life cycle consumption function and data from the expenditure index panel from the netherlands we discuss simple procedures that can be used to assess whether observations are missing at random and we consider more complicated estimation procedures that can be used to obtain consistent or efficient estimates in case of selectivity of attrition bias finally some attention is paid to the differences in identification consistency and efficiency between inferences from a single wave of the panel a balanced sub panel and an unbalanced panel

a study of credit risk of chinese listed companies zpp versus kmv abstractthe zero price probability zpp model is applied to evaluate the credit risk of listed companies in china and its performance is compared to that of the kealhofer mcquown vasicek kmv model the sample includes 34 financially distressed companies and a comparison group of 34 financially healthy companies the performances of zpp and kmv models are compared using various descriptive statistics and statistical tests the empirical analyses show that the zpp model is superior to the kmv model in terms of discriminatory power compared to the kmv model the zpp model performs much better in distinguishing between financially challenged and healthy firms among different specifications of the zpp model the naive constant variance zero price probability model outperforms those with generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity specifications this article is among the very first studies that provide evidence on the performance of the zpp model

improving the numerical performance of static and dynamic aggregate discrete choice random coefficients demand estimation the widely used estimator of berry levinsohn and pakes 1995 p roduces estimates of consumer preferences from a discrete choice demand model with random coefficients market level demand shocks and endogenous prices we derive numerical theory results characterizing the properties of the nested fixed point algorithm used to evaluate the objective function of blp s estimator we discuss problems with typical implementations including cases that can lead to incorrect parameter estimates as a solution we recast estimation as a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints which can be faster and which avoids the numerical issues associated with nested inner loops the advantages are even more pronounced for forward looking demand models where the bellman equation must also be solved repeatedly several monte carlo and real data experiments support our numerical concerns about the nested fixed point approach and the advantages of constrained optimization for static blp the constrained optimization approach can be as much as ten to forty times faster for large dimensional problems with many markets

how relevant is volatility forecasting for financial risk management it depends if volatility fluctuates in a forecastable way volatility forecasts are useful for risk management hence the interest in volatility forecastability in the risk management literature volatility forecastability however varies with horizon and different horizons are relevant in different applications moreover existing assessments of volatility forecastability are plagued by the fact that they are joint assessments of volatility forecastability and an assumed model and the results can vary not only with the horizon but also with the assumed model to address this problem we develop a model free procedure for assessing volatility forecastability across horizons perhaps surprisingly we find that volatility forecastability decays quickly with horizon volatility forecastability although clearly of relevance for risk management at the short horizons relevant for say trading desk management may be much less important at longer horizons

interrelated labor decisions of farm couples a censored response analysis of off farm work farm couples labor market responses are partly the discrete choice of entering the off farm labor market and partly the continuous choice of off farm working hours given entry such a setting is interesting when examining the increasing occurrence of multiple job holdings among farmers in western economies most existing analyses of off farm labor supply only model the decisions of the farmer not the joint decisions of the farm couple this article presents a framework for handling such interrelated discrete continuous choices involving also farm production and household consumption the derived two equation sub model for husband wife s censored labor responses is estimated from a 10 year norwegian panel data for 342 farms the results agree to some extent with earlier studies but are more informative because of the longer panels which allows a more extensive examination of latent heterogeneity and behavioral persistence because it provides cross effects in the spouses labor supplies the results show some interesting differences between how the independent variables influence the labor supply of operator and spouse this is most evident for the cross effects of education children and wage rate overall the results strongly support applying a panel censoring model that accounts for latent heterogeneity in this context

a precursor to muth tinbergen s 1932 model of rational expectations this paper describes a model published in 1932 in which explicitly rational expectations are used to study a dynamic problem of intertemporal inventory allocation the model is very similar to muth 1961 except that the stochastic process in the latter is serially correlated whereas in tinbergen s model the disturbances are serially uncorrelated hence tinbergen was able to solve a rational expectations model thirty years before muth s much more well known contribution copyright 1991 by royal economic society

what determines access to piped water in rural areas evidence from small scale supply systems in rural brazil summary this paper investigates whether small scale water supply systems implemented and operated by water user associations increase access to piped water supply in rural brazil by more than systems by local governments starting from 15 to 16 in the year 2000 access rates in rural areas with water user associations increased to 33 4 in 2010 in areas with local government supply systems access rates only increased to 24 9 based on data from brazilian census and the national water and sanitation survey the empirical analysis in this paper shows that the observed difference is effectively due to project type choice additionally it points toward higher accountability as a potential reason for better results of community based projects in municipalities where social groups requested a new system before the local government started implementation and therefore public awareness for the project was higher the increase in access rates is comparable to the increase in municipalities with water user association projects the same is true if local media is present or political competition in local elections is higher as the effect of project type on access rates might be confounded by simultaneous drivers of project type choice and access rates the quantitative analysis is based on a difference in difference estimator in combination with kernel matching to overcome the endogeneity of project type the treatment effect revealed by this analysis is robust to various specification changes and the robustness checks show no structural differences between treatment and control groups that could bias the results the calculation of matching weights for the kernel matching is informed by semi structured interviews with academics and sector experts in brazil explaining the determinants of project choice the interviews highlight the political economy behind infrastructure expansion in rural brazil

an empirical model of the medical match abstract this paper develops a framework for estimating preferences in a many to one matching market using only observed matches i use pairwise stability and a vertical preference restriction on one side to identify preferences on both sides of the market counterfactual simulations are used to analyze the antitrust allegation that the centralized medical residency match is responsible for salary depression due to residents willingness to pay for desirable programs and capacity constraints salaries in any competitive equilibrium would remain on average at least 23 000 below the marginal product of labor therefore the match is not the likely cause of low salaries jel c78 i11 j31 j44 k21 l44