aggregate scale economies market integration and optimal welfare state policy abstract using a two sector two country model with aggregate scale economies and unionisation we show that optimal welfare state policy entails positive levels of unemployment benefits under free trade and capital mobility in this setting economic integration does not reduce the revenue raising capacity of governments and thus does not lead to a race to the bottom in social standards instead trade and capital flows interact with welfare state policies in increasing welfare even when each government acts independently non cooperatively in determining its optimal welfare payment cooperation is shown to improve upon non cooperative outcomes by raising both the generosity of the welfare state and aggregate welfare

macroeconomic implications of production bunching factor demand linkages abstract existing empirical evidence suggests that output is more variable than consumption so that production smoothing is not apparently present in this paper we investigate some macroeconomic implications of the proposition that the empirical evidence reflects the presence of some firms in the economy that produce with nonconvex technologies overall when activities are sufficiently complementary and inventory holding is sufficiently costly nonconvexities at the firm level can generate a pattern of output and sales such that the variance of output exceeds that of sales at an aggregate level in this way nonconvexities at the individual firm level may have macroeconomic consequences

knowledge proximity and r d exodus abstract we explore not only how technological leaders and laggards react to agglomeration but within an agglomeration we look at how the relative presence of other leaders laggards and foreign firms affects these firms existing literature argues that technological leaders experience net knowledge outflows and are therefore losers in agglomerations however we do not know if they avoid locations with laggards more so than locations with leaders or vice versa thus we examine how the relative presence of each affects leaders location decisions for technologically lagging firms we argue they will prefer locations with leaders over locations with laggards we further posit that an increasing presence of foreign firms will have a particularly detrimental effect on technologically leading domestic firms as these lose out in the contest for talent contextualized in an emerging market with weak intellectual property rights protection we examine whether these concerns about knowledge spillovers and competition for talent prompt firms to close their r d facilities or remain open using 5798 observations of r d laboratories in india during 2003 2011 we find that while technologically leading firms are more likely to close their r d facilities as the presence of other domestic labs increases laggards are less likely to do so these findings suggest concerns over knowledge spillovers are present especially on the part of technologically leading firms moreover leaders are more concerned by the presence of other leaders technologically lagging firms by contrast are less likely to close r d facilities in the face of these concerns and will prefer staying near leaders over laggards finally we find evidence of foreign firms crowding out domestic technological leaders but not laggards in the competition for talent

new blood as an elixir of youth effects of human capital tenure on the explorative capability of aging firms the relationship between firm age and innovation has been an enduring topic of interest we contribute to this research by studying how the effect of firm age on the quality of explorative and exploitative innovations is affected by the firm specific and industry tenure of the talent resources employees that the firm utilizes we start with the baseline predictions that firm age is related to the development of better exploitative innovations and worse explorative innovations however the tenure of employees intervenes in these relationships by way of bringing in new knowledge mental models and beliefs we predict that longer firm specific and industry tenure of employees enhances the positive effect of firm age on the quality of exploitative innovations while amplifying the negative effect of firm age on the quality of explorative innovations in addition for both the baseline and the moderating effect we also formulate a prediction comparing the quality of explorative innovations with those of

imperfect competition and the keynesian cross abstract this paper presents a simple general equilibrium model in which the only non walrasian feature is imperfect competition in the goods market the model is shown to exhibit various keynesian characteristics in particular as competition in the goods market becomes less perfect the fiscal policy multipliers approach the values implied by the textbook keynesian cross

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

the role of market forces in assuring contractual performance the conditions under which transactors can use the market repeat purchase mechanism of contract enforcement are examined increased price is shown to be a means of assuring contractual performance a necessary and sufficient condition for performance is the existence of price sufficiently above salvageable production costs so that the nonperforming firm loses a discounted steam of rents on future sales which is greater than the wealth increase from nonperformance this will generally imply a market price greater than the perfectly competitive price and rationalize investments in firm specific assets advertising investments thereby become a positive indicator of likely performance

on the existence of conjectural equilibria with a priori chosen rationing patterns hahn s model of conjectural equilibrium hahn 1978 is investigated a proof of existence of non walrasian conjectural equilibrium for a regular economy is given the method used enables one to choose a priori and within a large class the rationing pattern to emerge in equilibrium for instance an equilibrium with a rationing pattern of general supply rationing is thereby shown to exist also it is possible to select a priori one commodity money which is never rationed these results are valid for the fix price model as well the method of our proof is basically a generalization of gale s method gale 1978

general equilibrium theory with imperfect competition abstract this survey is organized as follows i introduction ii the main issues iii negishi s model iv objective demand in the cournot nash framework v objective demand in the bertrand nash framework vi the assumption of quasi concavity of the profit functions vii compromises between the conjectural and the objective approach viii insights into the notion of perfect competition ix conclusion

on monopolistic competition and involuntary unemployment in a simple temporary general equilibrium model it is shown that if the number of firms is small imperfect price competition in the markets for goods may be responsible for the existence of unemployment at any given positive wage in our examples involving two firms facing their true demand curves total monopolistic labor demand remains bounded as the wage rate goes to zero and unemployment prevails for a sufficiently large inelastic labor supply in the competitive case total labor demand would go to infinity and intersect labor supply at a positive wage

unions oligopoly and the natural range of employment a simple two sector general equilibrium macromodel is presented wi th oligopolistic price determination in the product market and a unionized labor market in the first stage unions set the nominal wage and in the second stage firms choose outputs given wages by altering the balance of fiscal policy between the two sectors the government can achieve a continuum of aggregate employment levels the natural range of employment a unique natural rate will occur only i f one requires fiscal policy to be the same in both sectors this indicates that the natural rate property of some single or representative sect or macromodels is a special case

economic growth and conflict over the distribution of income abstract a thorough analysis of economic growth inflation and fluctuations resulting from the class struggle is presented the paper begins with the formulation of an extended predator prey model and pays attention to population growth technical progress differential saving consumption out of wealth trade union activity inflation labour hoarding affluence and the inherent contradictions of capitalism the paper proceeds with a neo classical reformulation to allow for smooth substitution possibilities in production and for time taken to recruit and fire labour an alternative extension of the model based on maximising the reduction in unit costs subject to kaldor s technical progress function is also provided

sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation fabio arcangeli paul david frank engelman christopher freeman massimo moggi richard nelson luigi orsenigo nathan rosenberg michele salvati g n von tunzelman two anonymous referees and the participants at the meeting of the committee on distribution growth and technical progress of the italian national research council cnr rome november 16 1985 have helped with various redraftings a particularly grateful acknowledgment is for the insightful and patient help of moses abramovitz this work has been undertaken at the science policy research unit spru university of sussex as part of the research program of the designated research centre sponsored by the economic and social research council esrc earlier support to the research that led to this paper by the italian national research council cnr is also gratefully acknowledged the statistical research has been undertaken with the assistance of stephano brioschi ilaria fornari and giovannu prennushi

is incomes policy the answer to unemployment in western europe unemployment has remained obstinately high ever since 1975 what has prevented governments from reducing it the answer is simple if unemployment were reduced by normal methods inflation would rise it follows that the only way to cut the long run level of unemployment is to find some other way of controlling inflation no such device will be costless but if we could find any method that was less costly than unemployment we ought to adopt it maurice chevalier was asked in later life what he thought of old age it s not so bad he replied when you consider the alternative that was a true economist talking and it is also the spirit in which i shall approach the unhappy choices open to us my argument will proceed roughly as follows first imagine that a costless incomes policy is available then most people would probably agree that if inflation was too high a temporary incomes policy would be a good idea in order to get inflation down but what then when it was down we would still be left with far too high an unemployment rate only a permanent incomes policy can substantially reduce the non inflationary level of unemployment however against these benefits have to be set the costs of an incomes policy a conventional incomes policy which permanently suspended collective bargaining would be out of the question in a free society so we have to have an incomes policy that works by incentive rather than by regulation the best thing would be a tax on wage increases levied on employers and proportional to wage increases above a prescribed norm i shall spend some time discussing this tax using various different models of wage setting to explain how it would have its effect and finally i shall try producing a first draft of the operator s manual

a cobweb model with local externalities abstract this paper considers an extension of the standard cobweb model in a market with local externalities in contrast with the standard cobweb model firms must forecast both prices and local quantities we develop new constructive stability and existence conditions for equilibria with positive outputs we find evidence of clusters of firms whose output behavior is correlated as equilibrium is reached we also show that an appropriately defined representative agent model with a global externality exhibits the same mean or second order properties of aggregate output as the more complex model with local externalities

strategic complementarity in business formation aggregate fluctuations and sunspot equilibria the extent to which changes in beliefs can be important factors in initiating economic fluctuations has been a prominent area of investigation for macroeconomists the notion that beliefs about the future influence current decisions is a property of almost all dynamic economic systems the more challenging task is identifying economic environments in which changes in beliefs alone influence current choices in such a way that the variations in beliefs are self fulfilling because the resulting fluctuations arise in the absence of variations in fundamental variables such as preferences and technology they are often termed sunspot equilibria apart from suggesting that instability of expectations may be a distinct source of cyclical volatility sunspot equilibria may also explain why apparently small disturbances in fundamentals lead to large change in macroeconomic aggregates in this study we demonstrate the possibility of sunspot equilibria in an overlappinggenerations economy characterized by a plausible form of strategic complementarity as more agents enter as producers in any particular sector of the economy they create an incentive for agents to enter as producers into other sectors as well 2 the basis for this

productivity gaps and underemployment abstract we examine the relationship between productivity gaps inside an industry and the level of employment in the economy in the context of a simple general equilibrium model which comprises a cournot industry we find that underemployment is minimized when such productivity gaps disappear

tacitness learning and international expansion a study of foreign direct investment in a knowledge intensive industry this paper examines the impact of knowledge tacitness on a firm s propensity to establish plants in foreign rather than domestic locations our predictions build on knowledge based internalization and evolutionary theories of foreign direct investment we argue that the tacitness of technology has an inverted u effect on the propensity to undertake foreign investment we also expect that as a firm learns about a technology it will become more likely to make foreign investments we examine two forms of learning that which accumulates as a function of the number of plants previously built by the firm transfer based learning and that which accumulates as a function of time since the firm started using a technology time based learning we investigate empirical effects in a sample of investments in the memory segment of the semiconductor industry our predictions about the curvilinear effect of tacitness are supported the results also suggest that learning is a matter of taking time to become acquainted with the use of the technology and of gaining experience through successive foreign plant investments the study adds to the understanding of the effects of knowledge on corporate expansion

involuntary unemplyment in imperfectly competitive general equilibrium models this paper is about involuntary unemployment in general equilibrium models with imperfect competition it surveys papers written after the seminal work of d aspremont dos santos ferreira and gerard varet 1984 this unemployment is called involuntary because it exists at any wage it results from imperfect competition in the product markets more specifically from firms excessive market power these papers have focussed their attention on the conditions required for involuntary unemployment in our presentation we characterise this form of unemployment through three elements consumers preferences price expectations and ford effects each element is important because it influences the demand for the good and hence its price elasticity the latter being central in the definition of firms market power jel classification d43 e24

focusing firm evolution the impact of information infrastructure on market entry by u s telecommunications companies 1984 1998 organization structure acts as a lens on the environment gathering information and shaping its flow through a firm to inform managers choices this shaping of information flow happens through an organization s operating units which selectively process information from the environment and through the links between them which pass information between units we explore the relationship between this information infrastructure and firm strategy using structure and service information from the eight largest telephone service providers in the united states from 1984 to 1998 we find that firms with more units that scan areas of opportunity are more likely to enter a market while firms with more units that scan nonfocal areas are less likely to enter the market we also find that personnel links between units and the corporate level of the firm often constrain entry to new markets by dampening a unit s appetite for risk personnel links between operating units on the other hand can make a firm more likely to enter new markets particularly when the cooperating units combine different sets of information thus a firm s information infrastructure plays a dual role in shaping firm evolution leading toward some paths and away from others

letting rivals come close or warding them off the effects of substitution threat on imitation deterrence a resource based theory postulate is that firms must defend their resources against imitation to sustain competitive advantage however by deterring imitation firms may induce rivals to create su

the impossibility of involuntary unemployment in an overlapping generations model with rational expectations abstract if there is unemployment no matter how low the wage rate becomes one speaks of involuntary unemployment this phenomenon has been shown to arise in a variety of temporary or atemporal macro models with imperfect competition in the goods markets in this paper we investigate whether the phenomenon of involuntary unemployment arises in a hartian overlapping generations model with rational expectations it does not neither in the short nor in the long run

innovation and industry evolution the theoretical literature on innovation has been concerned with a single innovation produced by a number of identical agents by contrast we consider a market in which one firm is the current incumbent while the remaining firms are challengers moreover we consider a sequence of innovations so that success does not imply that the successful firm reaps monopoly profits forever after but only until the next better innovation is developed we begin with a fully optimizing behavioral model and derive the equivalent of the schumpeterian process of creative destruction that is a firm enjoys temporary monopoly power but is soon overthrown by a more inventive challenger the essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process the fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers goods the new methods of production or transportation the new markets the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates schumpeter 1942 pp 82 83

keep searching and you ll find what do we know about variety creation through firms search activities for innovation this article critically reviews and synthesizes the contributions found in theoretical and empirical studies of firm level innovation search processes it explores the advantages and disadvantages of local and non local search discusses organizational responses and identifies potential exogenous triggers for different kinds of search it argues that the initial focus on local search was a consequence in part of the attention in evolutionary economics to path dependent behavior but that as localized behavior was increasingly accepted as the standard mode studies began to question whether local search was the best solution in all cases more recently the literature has focused on the trade offs being created by firms having to balance local and non local search we account also for the apparent variety paradox in the stylized fact that organizations within the same industry tend to follow different search strategies but end up with very similar technological profiles in fast growing technologies the article concludes by highlighting what we have learnt from the literature and suggesting some new avenues for research

incumbent entry into new market niches the role of experience and managerial choice in the creation of dynamic capabilities increasingly technological innovation creates markets for new products and services to survive firms must respond to these new markets how do firms develop the capabilities necessary to succeed in such changing conditions some suggest that experience with previous entry builds such capabilities others suggest that capabilities arise from experience producing and selling to existing markets the role of managers is also debated some argue that experience with existing markets causes managers to miss entry opportunities others argue that managers enter new markets when their firm possesses the experience needed to compete effectively in this paper we explore these issues by investigating entry patterns in the disk drive industry we investigate the effect of experience in existing markets and experience with previous market entry we find that experience in previous markets increased the probability that a firm would enter a new market we show that this experience had greater value if the firm entered the new market we infer that managers chose to enter these markets to obtain this increase in value

fiscal federalism in europe in democratic and totalitarian regimes alike the existing political and legal institutions of economic policy making are under challenge the wisdom of centralized fiscal regimes is now being questioned quietly under the banner of the new federalism in the united states and vocally if not violently through the secessionist movements of eastern europe and the soviet states as these nations experiment with decentralized fiscal institutions western europe is now looking to a more centralized economic order within the new european economic community this paper seeks to raise issues of importance to all such reform efforts and within that context to offer some cautionary advise for the design of e e c fiscal institutions

implicit contracts incentive compatibility and involuntary unemployment this paper considers the enforceability of employment contracts when employees performance cannot be verified in court so that piece rate contracts are not legally enforceable part i shows that there exists a variety of self enforcing implicit contracts modelled as perfect equilibria in a repeated game and characterizes all the wage and performance outcomes that can be implemented implementation requires a strictly positive surplus from employment the form of the contract depending on how this surplus is divided between firm and employee piece rate contracts and contracts with an informally agreed bonus can be made self enforcing but the use of severance pay and bonding does not extend the set of implementable allocations the resulting contracts resemble actual labor contracts more than do the contracts in standard principal agent models part ii analyses market equilibrium with these contracts also modelled as perfect equilibria in a repeated game and shows that many such equilibria exist unfilled vacancies and unemployed workers can co exist despite the existence of contracts that are potentially mutually beneficial for those jobs that are filled any division of the potential surplus is possible so that the market can have at the same time involuntary unemployment and vacancies that are unfilled despite filled jobs earning positive profits as a criterion for selecting equilibria a notion of renegotiation proofness is applied then either all workers are employed or all jobs filled but any division of the potential surplus is still possible the paper explores what further restrictions on beliefs give rise to a walrasian outcome in which all the potential surplus goes to the short side of the market and to an efficiency wage type outcome in which the potential surplus goes to the long side

stabilisation policy targets and unemployment in imperfectly competitive economies this paper argues that the rate of equilibrium unemployment depends on the objectives of the central bank in a model where the central bank uses monetary policy to stabilise the economy we show that unemployment and inflation will be lower with an inflation target than with targets for output money or nominal gdp the intuition for this is that the elasticities of demand in both the product and the labour markets are greater when there is an inflation target we show that this leads to a lower mark up of price over marginal cost and makes wages more sensitive to unemployment

predetermined wages and prices and the impact of expansionary government policy this paper characterizes the monetary equilibria of an economy with commodity and labour contracts if government policy is not too variable there may exist an equilibrium with predetermined wages and prices in this equilibrium observed changes in the money supply to finance government purchases have persistent real effects the paper also provides theoretical support for an inverse relationship between the degree of indexation in contracts and the persistence of policy effects

a failure inducement model of research and development expenditure abstract empirical evidence for the schumpeterian suggestion of a positive relationship between profitability and innovative effort is slim in fact the opposite is often suggested an alternative failure inducement hypothesis argues that firms make innovative efforts when performance falls below a minimum threshold resulting in a negative relationship between profitability and r d expenditures data on r d expenditures in italian industry in the early 1980s a period of severe economic crisis show that both hypotheses are relevant for firms whose profits are well above or well below average respectively

monetary economics a review essay in this essay i define money to be whatever objects serve as generally acceptable media of exchange and i define monetary economics to be the study of the causes and economic consequences of the monetization of exchange that is of the use of media of exchange these definitions lead me to specify the distinctive objectives of monetary economics to be to understand 1 the monetization of exchange and its relation to the technologies of production and of exchange 2 the form that money takes and especially the viability of fiat money 3 the determination and significance of the real value of units of money and 4 the relation between the nominal quantity of money and aggregate economic activity the essay tries to acquaint the reader with the contents of the recently published handbook of monetary economic as they relate to these objectives of monetary economics and offer some critical thoughts on selected unsettled issues in monetary economics that my reading of the handbook suggested this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the multifaceted nature of exploration and exploitation value of supply demand and spatial search for innovation in this paper exploration and exploitation are conceptualized in terms of a nonlocal local search continuum in three dimensional supply demand and geographic space using cross sectional data from a wide range of manufacturing industries we develop and validate an operational measure of the exploration exploitation concept in line with theory based arguments our analysis suggests that the value of supply side demand side and spatial exploration and exploitation is contingent on the environment while boundary spanning supply side search is found to be positively associated with innovation in more dynamic environments typical of the entrepreneurial regime phase of technology evolution such exploration appears to hurt innovation in less dynamic environments in a reverse fashion while boundary spanning demand side search is found to be favorably associated with innovation in less dynamic environments it appears to harm innovation in a more dynamic context interestingly spatial boundary spanning search seems to contribute to innovation in more as well as less dynamic environments with the caveat that the substantive findings of this study are based on cross sectional data we discuss the implications of our work and future research directions

output and unemployment dynamics in the united states 1950 1985 for us data over 1950 1985 the stochastic components of gnp growth and the unemployment rate appear to be stationary and there is substantial feedback between these variables the unconditional mean rate of unemployment in a joint model thus provides a natural benchmark in discussions of the business cycle a bivariate var model is used to describe output unemployment dynamics to estimate the degree of persistence of output innovations and to decompose output into trend and cycle the bivariate results are interpreted using a restricted var and it is shown that a closely related cyclical measure can be obtained directly from the okun s law equation

contracts and externalities how things fall apart a single principal interacts with several agents offering them contracts the crucial assumption of this paper is that the outside option payoffs of the agents depend positively on how many uncontracted or free agents there are we study how such a principal unwelcome though he may be approaches the problem of contract provision to agents when coordination failure among the latter group is explicitly ruled out two variants are considered when the principal cannot re approach agents there is a unique equilibrium in which contract provision is split up into two phases in phase 1 simultaneousoffers at good though varying terms are made to a number of agents in phase 2 offers must be made sequentially and their values are discontinuously lower they are close to the very lowest of all the outside options when the principal can repeatedly approach the same agent there is a multiplicity of equilibria in some of these the agents have the power to force delay they can hold off the principal s overtures temporarily but they must succumb in finite time in both models despite beingable to coordinate their actions agents cannot resist an invasion by the principal and hold to their best payoff it is in this sense that things eventually fall apart

market power and inflation market power exercised by firms has become central to macroeconomics recent theoretical work highlights the importance of the relation between market power and inflation we examine this relation for individual firms in eleven u s industries our econometric framework exploits restrictions from dynamic theory and information from financial markets to generate quantitative evidence on the responsiveness of market power to inflation we find that inflation usually has a positive effect on market power this relation is heterogeneous across the eleven industries and statistically significant positive relations are concentrated in industries with little market power

keynesian issues and economic theory recent research helped in clarifying the nature of short run price and quantity adjustments in keynesian macroeconomic models and the possible causes of a persistent excess labour supply it is argued however that theories involving imperfect competition and real wage rigidities generate classical unemployment where multipliers act through supply side effects while nominal inertia seems to be at the root of truly keynesian multipliers the appraisal also contains a nontechnical presentation of recent models of endogenous expectations driven business fluctuations cycles sunspots monetary policy can then have persistent real effects under complete information money as a sunspot

jonathan levin 2011 john bates clark medalist jonathan levin the 2011 recipient of the american economic association s john bates clark medal has established himself as a leader in the fields of industrial organization and microeconomic theory jon has made important contributions in many areas the economics of contracts and organizations market design markets with asymmetric information and estimation methods for dynamic games jon s combination of breadth and depth is remarkable ranging from important papers in very distinct areas such as economic theory and econometric methods to applied work that seamlessly integrates theory with data in what follows we will attempt to do justice not only to jon s academic work but also try to sketch a broader portrait of jon s other contributions to economics as a gifted teacher dedicated advisor and selfless provider of public goods

undominated wage rates in a unionized overlapping generations economy abstract an overlapping generations macro model where consumers are divided into workers and capitalists is analysed in each period the wage rate is negotiated between an employers union and a trade union other prices adjust competitively the solution concept used is cooperative the wage rate chosen by unions should be undominated i e there must not exist another wage rate leading to higher utilities for both workers and capitalists the resulting one period equilibria relative pareto optima rpo and also stationary equilibria stationary relative pareto optima srpo are analysed results are that full employment s rpo always exist and in some economies unemployment s rpo also exist sufficient conditions for the latter to be the case are stated and the existence of economies fulfilling these conditions is demonstrated

unemployment and the efficiency wage hypothesis there has been much recent discussion of the reasons why prices in certain markets and in particular in labour markets may not adjust to eliminate excess supply the absence of speedy adjustment of prices is an essential feature of the recent models of disequilibrium macroeconomics but for the most part no explanation for this absence is provided from within those models one explanation that has been around in the literature for some time and has been receiving increasing attention recently is the efficiency wage hypothesis initially applied to developing economies see leibenstein i957 it has more recently been adapted to developed economies by weiss i 980 and used in the context of a keynesian macroeconomic model by hart i 980 similar concepts have been applied to the credit market by stiglitz and weiss i98i the purpose of the present paper is to explore further the conditions under which the notion of an efficiency wage is applicable and can provide an explanation of involuntary unemployment the essential feature of the efficiency wage hypothesis is that the productivity of a firm s employees increases as their wage is increased at least over an economically relevant part of its range if the wage paid by the firm is denoted by w the number of employees by l and the productivity of each employee by p w where p w o then the effective labour force of the firm e can be represented by

money supply variability in a macro model of monopolistic competition the effects of changes in money supply variability are examined for a macro model of monopolistic competition increases in money supply variability raise demand uncertainty causing individual firms to produce more for inventory in addition expected profits decrease inducing a number of firms to leave the economy aggregate income then falls in spite of an increase in firm level production the result on aggregate income is standard but the results on inventories and the number of firms in the economy distinguish this monopolistic macro model empirically from conventional macro models when changes in money supply variability occur

on the effectiveness of economic policy when competition is imperfect and expectations are rational abstract we study the consequences of imperfect competition in a macro model with only one imperfection that of labor market competition otherwise the model is clean agents are optimizers prices are endogenous and expectations are rational we show that although imperfect competition in itself can explain unemployment as is well known it does not in itself give strong support to the use of traditional fiscal policy in fighting unemployment fiscal policy will almost inevitably have real effects but only through a special effect that may be difficult to control in many cases fiscal policy cannot create full employment and it may very well have perverse effects

equilibrium selection in imperfectly competitive economies with multiple equilibria this paper investigates the selection of an equilibrium in an economy with multiple pareto ranked nash equilibria a history dependent selection criterion is proposed which induces correlated behavior in equilibrium even though agents are playing one shot games and disturbances are not correlated over time the model economy may experience prolonged periods in which a low productivity technology is in use and then as a consequence of a large real disturbance may switch to an alternative equilibrium in which a high productivity technology is utilized thus the model qualitatively matches observations of serially correlated movements in output and employment and generates procyclical productivity though there are no exogenous technology shocks copyright 1994 by royal economic society

customer power strategic investment and the failure of leading firms why might firms be regarded as astutely managed at one point yet subsequently lose their positions of industry leadership when faced with technological change we present a model grounded in a study of the world disk drive industry that charts the process through which the demands of a firm s customers shape the allocation of resources in technological innovation a model that links theories of resource dependence and resource allocation we show that established firms led the industry in developing technologies of every sort even radical ones whenever the technologies addressed existing customers needs the same firms failed to develop simpler technologies that initially were only useful in emerging markets because impetus coalesces behind and resources are allocated to programs targeting powerful customers projects targeted at technologies for which no customers yet exist languish for lack of impetus and resources because the rate of technical progress can exceed the performance demanded in a market technologies which initially can only be used in emerging markets later can invade mainstream ones carrying entrant firms to victory over established companies

multiplicity of cournot equilibria and involuntary unemployment abstract in an overlapping generations model with cournot competition on the goods market it is shown that a continuum of stationary states and perfect foresight trajectories exists with unemployment at arbitrary low wages decisive for this is the influence that different forecast functions have on the objective demand curve even though they are consistent with perfect foresight with an example it is shown that simple adaptive and constant memory forecast rules generate such unemployment equilibria the corresponding temporary equilibrium dynamics may display stable unemployment and unstable full employment equilibria journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d43 d51 e24

the microfoundations project in general equilibrium theory the author 1 argues that the long lived microfoundations project based on general equilibrium models has come to an end and 2 shows that non walrasian models intended to provide microfoundations for macroeconomics are inadequate the arguments are derived from the sonnenschein mantel debreu smd demonstration of the arbitrariness of aggregate excess demands in general equilibrium models of the walrasian arrow debreu mckenzie type the issues raised have significance for the proper method of modeling macroeconomic phenomena for instance the smd results have led a growing number of general equilibrium theorists to make assumptions concerning macroeconomic structure in order to analyze other regularities at the macro level these points validate the position that systematic macroeconomic phenomena are intrinsically macroeconomic copyright 1994 by oxford university press

microeconomic uncertainty and macroeconomic indeterminacy we propose a stylized intertemporal macroeconomic model wherein the combination of decentralized trading and microeconomic uncertainty taking the form of privately observed and uninsured idiosyncratic shocks creates an information problem between agents and generates indeterminacy of the macroeconomic equilibrium for a given value of the economic fundamentals the economy admits a continuum of equilibria that can be indexed by the sales expectations of firms at the time of investment the walrasian equilibrium is one of these possible equilibria but it is reached only if firms are optimistic enough with a weaker degree of optimism equilibrium output employment and real wages will be lower than in the walrasian equilibrium moreover the range of possible equilibria will depend positively on the wage elasticity of the labour supply and on the magnitude of the information problem between buyers and sellers in our case the variance of the idiosyncratic shocks stochastic simulations performed on a calibrated version of the model show that pure demand expectation shocks may generate business cycle statistics that are not inconsistent with the observed ones 2006 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the influence of local search and performance heuristics on new design introduction in a new product market abstract this study develops and tests three sets of predictions concerning new design introduction during the initial period of ferment in a new product market we root our predictions most directly in the evolutionary economic concepts of local search and performance heuristics first we argue that new entrants will introduce most designs that are new to a product market during an initial period of ferment second we argue that local search will lead most product market incumbents that introduce second or subsequent designs after their entry to introduce designs that are similar to those incorporated in their existing products third we argue that firms selling products based on designs that are losing aggregate share in the market will be likely to introduce products based on new designs while firms losing market share to firms that are selling the same design are unlikely to introduce new designs our empirical analysis examines the magnetic resonance imaging mri subfield of the diagnostic imaging equipment industry between 1980 and 1986 a period that begins with the introduction of the first mri design and ends with the emergence of widely accepted design characteristics the results support the argument that local search and performance heuristics along with other market factors and business characteristics influence design introduction during a period of ferment

imperfect competition and the suboptimality of rational expectations abstract this paper investigates whether nonrational expectations can lead to outcomes which other things being equal pareto dominate rational expectations outcomes in order to carry out this investigation we construct an intertemporal micro based macroeconomic model with the two following strong points a it accommodates both rational and non rational expectations b both prices and quantities are determined by optimizing agents in particular prices are determined by explicit price setters using objective demand curves in this model the first theorem of welfare holds so that the walrasian equilibrium with rational expectations cannot be pareto dominated this conclusion is extremely fragile however and we show that as soon as some degree of imperfect competition is present rational expectations are suboptimal in the sense that they are dominated by irrational expectations

endogenous imperfectly competitive business cycles abstract we investigate how imperfect competition affects the occurrence and the properties of endogenous rational expectations business cycles in an overlapping generations model with constant returns to scale in production the model has explicit product and labor markets all characterized by monopolistic competition an implicit assumption of barriers to entry justifies that the number of firms is fixed even when positive profits occur it turns out that both market power of firms on the product markets and market power of unions on the labor markets make the occurrence of cycles more likely in particular imperfect competition on the product markets and the positive profits associated with it may have the effect that there is a cycle even if the labor supply curve is increasing in the real wage rate for competitive cycles is required not only a decreasing labor supply curve but a wage elasticity below 1 2 at stationary equilibrium market power on the labor markets may have the effect that imperfectly competitive cycles are in accordance with certain empirical regularities some well known some reported in the paper concerning fluctuations in output and involuntary unemployment since involuntary unemployment does not occur under perfect competition such regularities are incompatible with competitive cycles

structure learning and the speed of innovating a two phase model of collective innovation using agent based modeling continual increase in the complexity of technologies and innovations has resulted in actors i e individuals or organizations becoming more dependent on other actor s knowledge and skills to complement their own skills in the innovation process as a result networks have become more and more prominent in affecting the innovation process conceptualizing innovation as a search and learning process that results in a successful product we introduce a two phase model of collective innovation that accounts for the deliberateness of the innovation process using agent based modeling we explore how interaction structure among a group of actors affects the speed at which the group can collectively innovate in addition we present results from counterfactual simulations to highlight the importance of deliberate search and changing realized connections in modeling collective innovation process moreover we discuss the effects of the structure under different mechanisms of learning and different levels of actor s learning capabilities copyright 2010 the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

reputation and decision making under ambiguity a study of u s venture capital firms investments in the emerging clean energy sector this study examines the role of reputation on decision making under ambiguity drawing on social cognition and behavioral theories we propose that a firm s reputation exerts dual pressures on its decision making under ambiguity on the one hand a firm s reputation increases its aspirations for future performance and promotes its engagement in risky strategies to achieve them on the other hand preserving the already established reputation requires a firm to deliver consistent performance over time which promotes greater use of risk reduction strategies our analyses of the u s venture capital firms investments in the clean energy sector from 1990 to 2008 demonstrate that while reputable firms are more likely to invest in the emerging sector they also employ risk reduction strategies more extensively the sector s legitimation further influences these firms investment decisions both directly and through its interaction with firm reputation

optimal fiscal policy in open economies with labour market distortions abstract we set up a general equilibrium model with unemployment owing to distortions in the labour market it is shown that a public expansion financed by a distortionary income tax may give rise to a decrease in unemployment even if public goods are pure waste such an expansion may give rise to an increase in welfare if it is associated with a decrease in unemployment since part of the gain from a fiscal expansion is achieved at the expense of welfare in other countries non cooperative policies tend to be too expansionary

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

optimal cognitive distance and absorptive capacity in this paper we test the relation between cognitive distance and innovation performance of firms engaged in technology based alliances the key finding is that the hypothesis of an inverted u shaped effect of cognitive distance on innovation performance of firms is confirmed moreover as expected we found that the positive effect for firms is much higher when engaging in more radical exploratory alliances than in more exploitative alliances the effect of cumulative r d turns out to be mixed it appears to increase absorptive capacity as expected but there is clear evidence that it also reduces the effect of cognitive distance on novelty value making it increasingly difficult to find additional novelty

learning to contract evidence from the personal computer industry organizational forms involving more detailed contracts than are found in traditional spot market exchanges appear to be increasingly prevalent there has been relatively little analysis however of the extent to which firms learn how to use contracts to manage their interfirm relationships over time in this paper we conduct a detailed case study of a time series of 11 contracts concluded during 1989 1997 between the same two partners both of whom participate in the personal computer industry to explore whether and how firms learn to contract we find many changes to the structure of the contracts that cannot be fully explained by changes in the assets at risk in the relationship and evidence that these changes are largely the result of processes in which the firms were learning how to work together including learning how to contract with each other the nature of this learning appears to have been quite incremental and local that is not very far sighted we suggest how and when contracts might serve as repositories for knowledge about how to govern collaborations and suggest some boundary conditions for this phenomenon our findings also provide implications for the debate about whether contracts have a positive or negative effect on interorganizational trust we conclude with suggestions for future research

a simple macroeconomic model with monopolistic firms this paper presents a simple macroeconomic model in which firms outputs are imperfect substitutes and explores the macroeconomic implications of monopolistic competition the model is classical in some respects but keynesian in others multiple or unstable equilibria are not unlikely permanent price controls will in principle be desirable since they allow a permanent and efficient increase in aggregate output small costs of price adjustment may induce large deviations of output from the natural rate fiscal policy will generally affect aggregate output but the sign and magnitude of the government expenditure multiplier cannot be determined a priori

a model of imperfect competition with keynesian features the recent literature on the reappraisal of keynes has viewed keynesian equilibria as arising when prices are fixed and effective demands and supplies are equilibrated through the adjustment of quantities one problem with this approach is that it lacks a theory of price determination in particular of why prices are fixed in the present paper we show that a number of keynesian features arise in a model in which prices are fully flexible but where agents have some monopoly power one advantage of this approach is that it provides a theory of the determination of both prices and quantities

why real wages do not fall when there is unemployment abstract erroneous anticipations of fiscal policy results in involuntary unemployment if mutually agreeable unemployment may be eradicated by recontracting the real wage and employment level however if labor demand is inelastic unit elastic or within a bounded elastic range unemployment persists

imperfect competition and crowding out abstract this paper applies the central feature of imperfect competition in the goods market to examine the validity of the standard belief in international macroeconomics namely that policy effects in a small open economy are less effective than in a closed economy it is shown that the profit margin in imperfect competition and marginal propensity to leisure are the key factors in determining whether this standard belief is valid

imperfect competition and fixprice equilibria when goods are gross substitutes it is possible in principle that the price quantity pair generated by a model of imperfect competition may satisfy the conditions voluntary trading and absence of frictions for a fixprice equilibrium it is shown that imperfect competitors will typically satisfy voluntary trading provided that appropriate gross substitute assumptions are satisfied hence such assumptions are seen to ensure that the solutions of some well known imperfectly competitive general equilibrium models are indeed fixprice equilibria thus bringing together two important traditions in theoretical microeconomics copyright 1991 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

strategic risk an ordinal approach strategic management researchers have shown increasing awareness of the importance of the concept of risk at the strategic level in recognition of this interest this research adopts a commonly used conceptualization of risk and shows how this conceptualization leads to a new measure of risk based upon the chance of loss of relative position within a set of firms this framework is shown to be particularly appropriate for strategy research information contained in probability distributions describing the relative positions of sets of firms over time is shown to be partitionable on the basis of gain or loss in position as well as on firm identity leading to the derivation of a new measure of strategic risk for an individual firm this development also provides a hierarchical quantification of risk at the levels of the industry group and individual firm the ordinal risk measure is applied to both hypothetical data for illustration and to data on the u s airline industry

aggregate demand idle time and unemployment this paper develops a model of unemployment fluctuations the model keeps the architecture of the barro and grossman 1971 general disequilibrium model but replaces the disequilibrium framework on the labor and product markets by a matching framework on the product and labor markets both price and tightness adjust to equalize supply and demand there is one more variable than equilibrium condition on each market so we consider various price mechanisms to close the model from completely flexible to completely rigid with some price rigidity aggregate demand influences unemployment through a simple mechanism higher aggregate demand raises the probability that firms find customers which reduces idle time for firms employees and thus increases labor demand which in turn reduces unemployment we use the comparative statics predictions of the model together with empirical measures of quantities and tightnesses to re examine the origins of labor market fluctuations we conclude that 1 price and real wage are not fully flexible because product and labor market tightness fluctuate significantly 2 fluctuations are mostly caused by labor demand and not labor supply shocks because employment is positively correlated with labor market tightness and 3 labor demand shocks mostly reflect aggregate demand and not technology shocks because output is positively correlated with product market tightness

monopolistic equilibrium and involuntary unemployment abstract this note provides a simple example of an economy in which involuntary unemployment may be the consequence of monopolistic behavior on the product market

strategic complementarity slows macroeconomic adjustment to temporary shocks i introduction starting with the work of diamond 1982 hart 1982 and bryant 1983 a number of authors have employed models which use potential coordination failure to show that many features of the keynesian framework can be captured in models consistent with the microfoundations approach 1 for example in the context of a search model diamond demonstrates the existence of equilibria with too low a level of aggregative activity hart captures this feature and the simultaneous existence of multipliers in a model of monopolistic competition while technological interactions are the crucial element of bryant s analysis one reason to refer to these seemingly diverse set of papers as a single literature is that all the models are in fact driven by the presence of the same factor strategic complementarity a macroeconomic model which exhibits strategic complementarity is simply one where the larger is aggregate production the larger is the incentive for any particular agent to produce cooper and john 1988 first demonstrated that the presence of strategic complementarity is a characteristic of all of the models mentioned above and persuasively argue that this is the critical feature which lies behind the finding of keynesian type results in this paper we argue that strategic complementarity is also important in understanding the dynamic response of economies to temporary shocks in particular we find that strategic complementarity is potentially an important factor in understanding why an economy may return only slowly to steady state behavior after a temporary shock that is given the presence of any of a variety of factors which would cause the economy not to instantaneously return to full employment after a temporary shock e g adjustment costs associated with changing the capital stock the speed with which the economy returns to steady state behavior is negatively related to the degree of strategic complementarity in the environment related analyses are those of haltiwanger and waldman 1989 bomfim and diebold 1992 and baxter and king 1990 the first two papers consider models wherein some agents are characterized by adaptive or regressive expectations while others am characterized by rational expectations among other findings these analyses demonstrate that the speed with which the economy returns to steady state behavior after a temporary shock is negatively related to the degree of strategic complementarity in the economy 2 we argue that the relationship between strategic complementarity and the dynamic response to temporary shocks is more general than is suggested by these papers in their analyses temporary shocks have long term effects because some of the agents make systematic mistakes when forming expectations here it is argued that given any of a variety of factors which would cause temporary shocks to have long term effects there is a negative relationship between adjustment speed and the degree of strategic complementarity baxter and king consider a world where because of productive externalities the economy exhibits increasing returns at the economy wide level using simulation techniques they show first that the presence of increasing returns serves to increase the output volatility exhibited by the economy in response to shocks and second that after a one time shock the return to steady state behavior is slower in a world characterized by increasing returns baxter and king do not discuss their results in terms of strategic complementarity however it is easy to show that one way of introducing strategic complementarity is to assume that the economy exhibits increasing returns at the economy wide level our paper suggests that what is central in baxter and king s study is not the introduction of increasing returns per se but rather that the introduction of increasing returns is one way of introducing strategic complementarity that is baxter and king s findings can be thought of as a manifestation of the central point of the current paper

market incumbency and technological inertia this paper uses a case study and a simple mathematical model to study the link between the incumbency and incentives to innovate and introduce drastically new products it identifies the conditions under which fears of self cannibalization are particularly likely to lead incumbents to soft pedal such innovations

the political economy of monopoly and competition a critique of monopoly and stagnation theory abstract this paper examines critically the kaleckian theory of monopoly capitalism proposed by cowling 1982 the supply side of the model is shown to be incapable of providing an aggregate degree of monopoly and the neglect of inter sectoral competition is highlighted on the demand side there is little indication of the source of stagnationary tendencies it is the emphasis on collusion over conflict which underpins stagnation the model is characterised by its emphasis on distribution and exchange at the expense of production relations and is an inadequate representation of monopoly capitalism

unemployment and macroeconomics this paper discusses some issues in the theory of unemployment proposes a framework for the analysis of unemployment and applies the framework to the analysis of the rise in unemployment in britain after 1979 the framework is based on bilateral monopoly in the labor market and the explanation for the rise in unemployment in britain rests primarily with a demand side shock which caused the rise in 1980 81 and supply side persistence which has kept unemployment up since then copyright 1989 by the london school of economics and political science

death of the lethargic effects of expansion into new technical subfields on performance in a firm s base business this paper finds that industry incumbents that do not expand into new technical subfields tend to fare poorly in their established businesses even if the market for the established products continues to exist firms that expand from their established businesses survive longer and achieve greater subsequent market share than competitors that do not expand by some measures however a failed attempt to expand into a new subfield may be even more harmful to a base business than nonexpansion the study employs conventional and accelerated event time regression models to analyze market share and survival the sample which includes 371 incumbents in four base subfields of the medical diagnostic imaging industry between 1953 and 1989 examines performance following the emergence of five new technical subfields of the industry

multiplicity of equilibria and fluctuations in dynamic imperfectly competitive economies this paper investigates two aspects of the macroeconomic consequences of market participation decisions of imperfectly competitive firms first can there exist multiple pareto ranked nash equilibria indexed by the level of market participation that is can there exist both thin and thick market equilibria second can the variations in the degree of competition that stem from shocks to preferences and technologies help to understand observed fluctuations in the macroeconomy this paper is part of an ongoing research program intended to understand the macroeconomic implications of the coordination of economic activities in model economies without complete and or competitive markets in such environments the fundamental theorems of welfare economics do not apply and it is quite possible for the economy to have multiple pareto ranked equilibria low welfare equilibria represent situations in which individual agents acting noncooperatively are unable to successfully coordinate their activities and reach a preferred equilibrium this is termed a coordination failure in equilibria of this type there are 100 bills lying on the sidewalk but it takes the effort of more than one individual i e coordination to reap these gains our model relates to two important strands of the literature on coordination failures first are model economies in which the deviation from the arrow debreu paradigm arises from the market power of sellers see for example oliver hart 1982 in these models the number of active firms is usually taken to be exogenous our contribution is in part to allow the number of firms to be determined by the costs and benefits of market participation this allows us to relate the degree of competition in the economy to variations in fundamentals like technology and preferences in addition to exogenous but self fulfilling variations in expectations second our model represents another example of a participation externality in which the gains to participating in an activity such as entering a market depend on the number of other agents participating as well the papers by peter diamond 1982 chatterjee 1988 and m pagano 1987 1988 explore market participation externalities of a different variety in diamond s work these externalities arise through the matching process while chatterjee and pagano 1987 explore the risk reducing effects of large markets similar externalities are found in the industrial organization literature on networks as in michael katz and carl shapiro 1985 the model explored in this paper highlights a participation externality arising from the interaction of imperfectly competitive firms 1 tdiscussants robert e hall stanford university peter diamond mit olivier j blanchard mit

the elementary economics of social dilemmas a social dilemma is in essence a prisoners dilemma in a continuous strategy space i discuss a number of social dilemmas that have caught my attention offer an elementary diagrammatic synthesis of them and discuss some of the economic insights that the diagrams capture including incentives for pre commitment finally i model pre commitment via delegation and link results to the literature on the evolution of preferences l economie elementaire des dilemmes sociaux un dilemme social est essentiellement un dilemme du prisonnier dans un espace continu de strategie l auteur discute d un certain nombre de dilemmes sociaux qui ont retenu son attention il en propose une synthese graphique elementaire et discute certaines des suggestions economiques qui decoulent de ces diagrammes comme par exemple les incitations a se pre engager finalement l auteur construit un modele de pre engagement par delegation et relie ses resultats a la litterature sur l evolution des references

economics of development and the development of economics the purpose of this paper is to restore some historical perspective by highlighting the many contributions of development economics to the rest of economics we will point out to the younger generations how some of the glittering ideas they currently play with originally came from that now neglected field and how in some cases they have rediscovered with great fanfare insights that were well known in the development literature familiarity with which would have enriched their own work