market efficiency and insider trading new evidence that corporate insiders earn profits from stock trading does not surprise most financial economists but that outsiders can earn abnormal returns by using pub licly available insider trading data constitutes a serious exception to stock market efficiency the authors show that this anomaly conti nues to exist despite the publication of studies attesting to its exi stence they suggest that the anomalous profits to outsiders are a ma nifestation of the size and earnings price ratio effects controlling for these factors reduces outsider profits by half the additional a ssumption of a 2 percent transactions cost makes outsider profits zer o or negative insider profits after an assumed 2 percent transactio ns cost are a moderate 3 percent per annum for annual holding period s copyright 1988 by the university of chicago

what can we learn about financial access from u s immigrants the role of country of origin institutions and immigrant beliefs immigrants from countries with more effective institutions are more likely than other immigrants to have a relationship with a bank and to use formal financial markets more extensively the evidence that a country s institutional environment shapes beliefs and by extension the use of financial services provides support for policies that focus on institutional reforms in promoting financial access after holding wealth education and other factors constant the impact of institutional quality in the country of origin affects the financial market participation of all immigrant groups except those who have lived in the united states for more than 28 years these findings are robust to alternative measures of institutional effectiveness to controlling for additional country of origin characteristics and to various methods for addressing potential biases caused by immigrant self selection

payment card rewards programs and consumer payment choice abstract by using a unique data set that contains detailed information about consumer payment choice and consumers attitudes toward each payment method we estimate the effects of payment card rewards on consumer choice of payment methods our approach allows us to control for consumer heterogeneity we find the effects of rewards to be statistically significant across five retail types our policy experiments suggest that for the sub population who hold both credit and debit cards removing rewards would increase their share of paper based payment methods i e cash and checks measured in terms of in store transactions by no more than 4 percentage points

in love with the debit card but still married to cash abstractusing shopping diary survey data we show that changing payment patterns is a challenging task even when consumers have fallen in love with a new payment instrument they find it hard to divorce from their old payment instrument we find a discrepancy between how consumers prefer to pay and how they actually pay half of the consumers who prefer the debit card to cash don t use the debit card to pay a majority of their point of sale transactions our regression results show that the habit of paying cash plays a significant role explaining the presence of a gap

choosing how to pay the influence of foreign backgrounds abstract is having a foreign background a relevant factor in choosing between payment instruments in consumer point of sale transactions after migration we analyze this question using a unique diary survey in which both participants with a dutch and a foreign background documented their daily purchases we present several pieces of evidence suggesting that foreign backgrounds still influence the choice between payment instruments after migration to the netherlands for instance we find that first generation migrants from a number of countries that can be seen as cash oriented are more likely to use cash in the netherlands at the same time second generation migrants have similar payment habits as individuals with a dutch background this finding suggests that payment behavior is not passed on between generations but affected by host country payment habits finally we suggest that in this context special information campaigns to increase debit card usage will not have clear net social benefits

comparing optima do simplifying assumptions affect conclusions consider a family of maximization models in which the optimum trades off beneficial and costly effects then comparative statics derived under many kinds of simplifying assumptions about the benefits technology are also true for general convex and nonconvex technologies for example any comparative statics conclusion about investment by a risk averse decision maker under uncertainty that holds when expected returns are described by a general linear function also holds for an arbitrary nonlinear expected return function

bouncing out of the banking system an empirical analysis of involuntary bank account closures using a new database we document the determinants of involuntary consumer bank account closures during 2001 2005 approximately 30 million debit accounts were involuntarily closed for excessive overdrafting we focus on multiple factors to explain this phenomenon household economics and financial decision making ability social capital bank policies and the alternative financial services sector involuntary closures are more frequent in us counties with a larger fraction of single mothers lower education levels lower wealth and higher unemployment closures are higher in communities with high property crime rates and low electoral participation bank policies have an independent relation to closures with counties having more competitive banking markets and more multi market banks experiencing higher closure rates bank structure also seems to affect the speed at which banks adjust their policies to changes in household income finally using both national data and a state level shift in regulation we find evidence that access to payday lending leads to higher rates of involuntary account closure

pricing and the news vendor problem a review with extensions in the newsvendor problem a decision maker facing random demand for a perishable product decides how much of it to stock for a single selling period this simple problem with its intuitively appealing solution is a crucial building block of stochastic inventory theory which comprises a vast literature focusing on operational efficiency typically in this literature market parameters such as demand and selling price are exogenous however incorporating these factors into the mode l can provide an excellent vehicle for examining how operational problems interact with marketing issues to influence decision making at the firm level in this paper we examine an extension of the newsvendor problem in which stocking quantity and selling price are set simultaneously we provide a comprehensive review that synthesizes existing results for the single period problem and develop additional results to enrich the existing knowledge base we also review and develop insight into a dynamic inventory extension of this problem and motivate the applicability of such models

serial correlation in demand backlogging and production volatility this paper explores the idea that stockout avoidance motives together with serial correlation in demand and or the backlogging of excess demand is sufficient to induce firms to behave so that the variance of production exceeds the variance of sales the authors show that the idea holds under a wide range of circumstances facing firms including additive as well as multiplicative demand uncertainty a general form of serial correlation in demand whether inventory and shortage costs apply and whether payment occurs at order or delivery the results greatly enhance the empirical relevance of the idea copyright 1996 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

whither loose change the diminishing demand for small denomination currency while payment card usage has increased dramatically the stock of outstanding currency has not declined as rapidly we analyze changes in cash demand for 13 advanced economies from 1988 to 2003 by separating cash into three denomination categories to disentangle its store of wealth and payment functions defining denominations commonly dispensed by automated teller machines atms as the medium category we show that demand for small denomination currency decreases with greater debit card usage and with greater retail market consolidation in contrast the demand for high denomination notes decreases when interest rates rise but is generally unaffected by changes in debit card usage

taming the bullwhip effect whilst watching customer service in a single supply chain echelon we study a generalised order up to policy that has highly desirable properties in terms of order and inventory variance and customer service levels it generates we quantify exactly the variance amplification in replenishment orders i e the bullwhip effect and the variance of inventory levels over time for i i d and the weakly stationary auto regressive ar moving average ma and auto regressive moving average arma demand processes we demonstrate that high customer service as measured by fill rate and smooth replenishments need not increase inventory cost substantially we observe that in some instances of the arma demand pattern this comes at the expense of a relatively small increase in safety stock whilst in other instances inventory levels can actually be reduced

consumers use of debit cards patterns preferences and price response debit card use at the point of sale has grown dramatically in recent years in the united states and now exceeds the number of credit card transactions however many questions remain regarding patterns of debit card use consumer preferences when using debit and how consumers might respond to explicit pricing of card transactions using a new nationally representative consumer survey this paper describes the current use of debit cards by u s consumers including how demographics affect use in addition consumers stated reasons for using debit cards are used to analyze how consumers substitute between debit and other payment instruments we also examine the relationship between household financial conditions and payment choice finally we use a key variable on bank imposed transaction fees to analyze price sensitivity of card use and find a 12 decline in overall use in reaction to a mean 1 8 fee charged on certain debit card transactions we believe this represents the first microeconomic evidence in the united states on price sensitivity for a card payment at the point of sale

cyclic pricing by a durable goods monopolist in the model of this paper a monopoly seller of a durable good holds periodic sales as a means of price discrimination a new cohort of consumers enters the market in each period interested in purchasing the good either immediately or after a delay within each cohort consumers vary in their tastes for the good under broad conditions the seller will vary the price over time in most periods he will charge a price just low enough to sell immediately to consumers with a high willingness to pay periodically however he will drop the price far enough to sell to an accumulated group of consumers with a low willingness to pay

how effective are rewards programs in promoting payment card usage empirical evidence card issuers have mainly relied on rewards programs as their main strategy to increase usage however there is scarce evidence on the effectiveness of these programs this paper is addressing two topics which could have important managerial and public policy implications i it estimates the impact of rewards on the use of cards and ii it quantifies their economic effects in terms of the cash substitution we find that rewards may significantly modify choice for card payments their economic impact also varies significantly across types of rewards and merchant activities additionally rewards seem to be more effective for debit cards

mimickers of corporate insiders who make large volume trades most prior research shows that corporate insiders can systematically earn abnormal returns by buying or selling their own securities also several studies have investigated whether outsiders can earn abnormal returns by mimicking the trades of insiders after the latter report their trades the findings of these studies suggest that they cannot in contrast this study s results indicate that outsiders can earn significant abnormal returns by mimicking such trades this conclusion is consistent with a growing body of empirical literature that suggests that the market is not efficient in the semistrong form i e is not efficient with respect to all publicly available information

the impact of pricing policy on sales variability in a supermarket retail context abstract the bullwhip effect is recognized to be a significant cost driver in supply chains one of the measures proposed frequently to counter bullwhip effect is price stability through everyday low pricing edlp however this study suggests that with an auto regressive ar1 demand process the use of constant instead of dynamic pricing may result in lower profitability and higher demand volatility an optimal price and stocking level policy is developed with normally distributed demand in this study and the model is tested using parameters from a supermarket scanner data set to determine the impact of two pricing policies the hypothesis that low prior period demand leads to discounted pricing is also tested and partially supported

category management and coordination in retail assortment planning in the presence of basket shopping consumers this paper studies the assortment planning problem with multiple merchandise categories and basket shopping consumers i e consumers who desire to purchase from multiple categories we present a duopoly model in which retailers choose prices and variety level in each category and consumers make their store choice between retail stores and a no purchase alternative based on their utilities from each category the common practice of category management cm is an example of a decentralized regime for controlling assortment because each category manager is responsible for maximizing his or her assigned category s profit alternatively a retailer can make category decisions across the store with a centralized regime we show that cm never finds the optimal solution and provides both less variety and higher prices than optimal in a numerical study we demonstrate that profit loss due to cm can be significant finally we propose a decentralized regime that uses basket profits a new metric rather than accounting profits basket profits are easily evaluated using point of sale data and the proposed method produces near optimal solutions

value of information in capacitated supply chains we incorporate information flow between a supplier and a retailer in a two echelon model that captures the capacitated setting of a typical supply chain we consider three situations 1 a traditional model where there is no information to the supplier prior to a demand to him except for past data 2 the supplier knows the s s policy used by the retailer as well as the end item demand distribution and 3 the supplier has full information about the state of the retailer order up to policies continue to be optimal for models with information flow for the finite horizon the infinite horizon discounted and the infinite horizon average cost cases study of these three models enables us to understand the relationships between capacity inventory and information at the supplier level as well as how they are affected by the retailer s s s values and end item demand distribution we estimate the savings at the supplier due to information flow and study when information is most beneficial

information distortion in a supply chain the bullwhip effect this article originally appeared in management science april 1997 volume 43 number 4 pp 546 558 published by the institute of management sciences consider a series of companies in a supply chain each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member in this setting inbound orders from a downstream member serve as a valuable informational input to upstream production and inventory decisions this paper claims that the information transferred in the form of orders tends to be distorted and can misguide upstream members in their inventory and production decisions in particular the variance of orders may be larger than that of sales and distortion tends to increase as one moves upstream a phenomenon termed bullwhip effect this paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect demand signal processing rationing game order batching and price variations actions that can be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of this distortion are also discussed

how people pay evidence from grocery store data abstract empirical evidence based on grocery store transaction data shows that consumer payment behavior at the point of sale is important for understanding models of money demand there are statistically significant effects of transaction costs opportunity costs and product characteristics on the choice of payment instrument which then in turn affect money demand these results emphasize the overlap between the work of empirical researchers in payment choice and theoretical modelers of monetary economics and should inform both literatures

the bullwhip effect progress trends and directions the bullwhip effect refers to the phenomenon where order variability increases as the orders move upstream in the supply chain this paper provides a review of the bullwhip literature which adopts empirical experimental and analytical methodologies early econometric evidence of bullwhip is highlighted findings from empirical and experimental research are compared with analytical and simulation results assumptions and approximations for modelling the bullwhip effect in terms of demand forecast delay replenishment policy and coordination strategy are considered we identify recent research trends and future research directions concerned with supply chain structure product type price competition and sustainability

a dynamic joint replenishment policy with auto correlated demand we consider a joint replenishment problem where the product demands are auto correlated but independent of each other a dynamic periodic review policy is developed and its parameters are determined by a heuristic which aims at minimizing the total inventory cost which includes the holding cost the set up cost and the shortage cost the heuristic updates the review interval and the target inventory level of every product at each review point based on the current inventory status and the past demand data a simulation model is developed to compare the performance of this proposed policy with an existing periodic review policy the results show that the proposed policy has consistently achieved significant saving in all the different experimental scenarios

conditions of reverse bullwhip effect in pricing under joint decision of replenishment and pricing abstract a reverse bullwhip effect in pricing rbp occurs when an amplification of price variability takes place moving from the upstream suppliers to the downstream customers in a supply chain in this study we investigate rbp conditions for supply chains where joint replenishment and pricing decisions are made commencing with a single stage supply chain in which a retailer faces a random and price sensitive demand we extend the results to a multi stage supply chain using a leader follower game theoretical framework we discuss rbp conditions for supply chains where newsvendor and continuous review inventory policies are employed and present numerical examples for commonly used demand functions

combined pricing and inventory control under uncertainty this paper addresses the simultaneous determination of pricing and inventory replenishment strategies in the face of demand uncertainty more specifically we analyze the following single item periodic review model demands in consecutive periods are independent but their distributions depend on the item s price in accordance with general stochastic demand functions the price charged in any given period can be specified dynamically as a function of the state of the system a replenishment order may be placed at the beginning of some or all of the periods stockouts are fully backlogged we address both finite and infinite horizon models with the objective of maximizing total expected discounted profit or its time average value assuming that prices can either be adjusted arbitrarily upward or downward or that they can only be decreased we characterize the structure of an optimal combined pricing and inventory strategy for all of the above types of models we also develop an efficient value iteration method to compute these optimal strategies finally we report on an extensive numerical study that characterizes various qualitative properties of the optimal strategies and corresponding optimal profit values

a novel time varying bullwhip effect metric an application to promotional sales abstract bullwhip effect is a problem of paramount importance that reduces competitiveness of supply chains around the world a significant effort is being devoted by both practitioners and academics to understand its causes and to reduce its pernicious consequences nevertheless limited research has been carried out to analyse potential metrics to measure it that typically are summarized in the coefficient of variation ratio of different echelons demand this work proposes a new metric based on a time varying extension of the aforementioned bullwhip effect metric by employing recursive estimation algorithms expressed in the state space framework to provide at each single time period a real time bullwhip effect estimate in order to illustrate the results a case study based on a serially linked supply chain of two echelons from the chemical industry is analysed particularly this metric is employed to analyse the effect of promotional campaigns on the bullwhip effect on a real time fashion the results show that effectively the bullwhip effect is not constant along time but interestingly it is reduced during the promotional periods and it is bigger before and after the promotion takes place

anomalies in security returns and the specification of the market model we examine the hypothesis originally advanced by roll 12 that observed anomalies in excess returns can be explained by misspecification of the market model used to estimate systematic risk we find substantial misspecifications in the model systematically related to size and period of listing of the securities in question there is some evidence that these misspecifications are associated with systemic biases in measured betas used to construct excess returns

consumers perceived risk and hold and use of payment instruments abstractconsumer decisions regarding retail payment instruments entail private and social costs due to these social costs policymakers are increasingly trying to understand the determinants of consumer payment choices as documented by the european central bank s regular publications this article contributes to this understanding by investigating the role of perceived risk based on an original survey of french consumers we measure the effects of perceived risk on the decisions to hold and use the main retail payment instruments cash card and cheque we point to the sequential dependence of the decisions to hold and use a payment instrument and study jointly both decisions the bivariate analysis based on risk factors shows that unavailability risk and time risk have the greatest transverse influence on holding and using payment instruments our results robust to controlling for consumer characteristics confirm their propensity for a quick to use and constantly available payment instrument we dis

incentives at the counter an empirical analysis of surcharging card payments and payment behaviour in the netherlands in card payment systems no surcharge rules prohibit merchants from charging consumers extra for card payments however such rules are prohibited in the netherlands dutch retailers are allowed to surcharge consumers for debit card use this setting permits an empirical analysis of the impact of surcharging card payments on merchant acceptance and consumer payment choice based on consumer and retailer survey data our analysis shows that surcharging steers consumers away from using debit cards towards cash half of the observed difference in debit card payment shares across retailers can be explained by this surcharge effect removing debit card surcharges may induce cost savings of more than eur 50 million in the long run