the effects of entry regulation on oligopolistic interaction the uruguayan banking sector this article develops a methodology to test alternative oligopoly models and to analyze the effects of entry restrictions on conduct this methodology is applied to the uruguayan banking sector whose legal entry barriers were significantly relaxed during the late 1970s the results are consistent with a von stackelberg type of industry where the degree of oligopolistic interaction among the leading firms is reduced as a consequence of the relaxation of the legal entry barriers

the intrafamily allocation of goods how to separate the adult from the child separability between parents and children s consumption is a necessary assumption in any attempt to impute the intrafamily allocation of goods this assumption implies an estimation procedure where the observed effect of demographic variables on the marginal propensity to consume adult goods is used as a key for identifying the rule governing the distribution between children s and parents consumption using the u s 1972 consumption expenditure survey i found that white and black families tend to allocate three quarters of their consumption to parents and one quarter to children tests for robustness for selectivity bias and of the separability assumption itself uphold these findings

intrahousehold distribution and poverty evidence from cote d ivoire poverty measures often ignore the distribution of resources within families and the gains from joint consumption in this paper we estimate the allocation process and adult economies of scale in households from cote d ivoire using a collective model of household consumption identification relies on the observation of adult specific goods as in the rothbarth method and a joint estimation on couples and singles our results show that men and women s shares of total expenditure are of the same order of magnitude and children s shares are small scale economies are large and affect poverty measures

estimating ethnic preferences using ethnic housing quotas in singapore there are many policies around the world aimed at integrating groups gender ethnic national in education employment immigration and housing in the case of housing since prices may not internalize externalities in residential location choices we need to know preferences for welfare analysis this paper estimates people s taste for living with own ethnic groups ethnic preferences using unique policy variation from the ethnic housing quotas in singapore my approach combines policy induced variation commonly used in reduced form settings with a non parametric identi cation strategy in a structural demand estimation framework a la berry levinsohn and pakes 1995 i nd that all groups have strong preferences to live with at least some other

time allocation within the family welfare implications of life in a couple a collective model of leisure demand generalised to the production of a household public good is estimated on the british household panel survey the sharing rule is identified by using an original parametric framework based on the change of family status from single living to couple or from couple to single living womens ratios of private household expenditures are 40 on average the level of intra household inequality appears highly dependent on the intra household wage gap omitting household production in the model would overestimate the ratio by 7 percentage points on average

measuring market power in multi product oligopolies the us meat industry this paper develops and estimates an economic model for measuring market power in a quantity setting oligopoly engaged in the joint production of demand related goods the model which allows for firms conjectures about both same and cross market responses to own output variation is applied to the us meat beef and pork industry he hypothesis that the industry s equilibrium reflects price taking behaviour is rejected the hypothesis of no cross effects cannot be rejected roughly half of the farm to retail price spreads for beef and pork appear to be attributable to market power

the quest for a balanced ethnic mix singapore s ethnic quota policy examined to achieve a balanced ethnic mix singapore has implemented an ethnic quota policy on public housing since 1 march 1989 with 86 per cent of the population living in public housing this policy has immense repercussions on the configuration of the ethnic residential landscape this article examines the impact of the quota policy on the buying and renting as well as the selling or letting of public housing the differential response by the various ethnic groups is revealed the policy per se may not achieve its intended impact and may ironically have the least impact on the group it was most intended for integration policies must be more holistic in approach and more sympathetic in execution

estimating consumption economies of scale adult equivalence scales and household bargaining power how much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married what percentage of a married couple s expenditures are controlled by the husband how much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart we propose and estimate a collective model of household behaviour that permits identification and estimation of concepts such as these we model households in terms of the utility functions of its members a bargaining or social welfare function and a consumption technology function we demonstrate generic non parametric identification of the model and hence of a version of adult equivalence scales that we call indifference scales as well as consumption economies of scale the household s resource sharing rule or members bargaining power and other related concepts copyright 2013 oxford university press

manufacturer retailer channel interactions and implications for channel power an empirical investigation of pricing in a local market the issue of power in the marketing channels for consumer products has received considerable attention in both academic and practitioner journals as well as in the popular press our objective in this paper is to provide an empirical method to measure the power of channel members and to understand the reasons demand factors cost factors nature of channel interactions for this power we confine our analysis to pricing power in channels we use methods from the game theory literature in marketing on channel interactions to obtain the theoretical framework for our empirical model this literature provides us a definition of power one that is based on the proportion or percentage of channel profits that accrue to each of the channel members there can be a variety of possible channel interactions between manufacturers and retailers in channels the theoretical literature has examined some of these games for example choi 1991 examines how channel profits for manufacturers and retailer vary if channel interactions are either vertical nash or if they are stackelberg leaderfollower with either the manufacturer or the retailer being the price leader each of these three channel interaction games has different implications for profits made by manufacturers and retailers and consequently for the relative power of the channel members in contrast to the previous literature that has focused largely on the above three channel interaction games our model extends the game theoretic literature by allowing for a continuum of possible channel interactions between manufacturers and a retailer furthermore for a given product market we empirically estimate from the data where the channel interactions lie in this continuum more critically we obtain measures of how channel profits are divided between manufacturers and the retailer in the product market where a higher share of channel profit is associated with higher channel power we then examine how channel power is related to demand conditions facing various brands and cost parameters of various manufacturers in going from game theory based theoretical models of channel interactions to empirical estimation we use the new empirical industrial organization framework bresnahan 1988 as part of this structural modeling framework we build retail level demand functions for the various brands manufacturer and private label in a given product category given these demand functions we obtain optimal pricing rules for manufacturers and the retailer in determining their optimal prices manufacturers and the retailer account for how all the players in the channel choose their optimal prices that is we account for dependencies in decision making across channel members these dependencies are characterized by a set of conduct parameters which are estimated from market data the conduct parameters enable us to identify the nature of channel interactions between manufacturers and the retailer along the continuum mentioned previously in addition to the demand and conduct parameters manufacturers marginal costs are also estimated in the model these marginal cost estimates along with the manufacturer prices and retail prices available in our dataset enable us to compute the division of channel profits among the channel members hence we are able to obtain insights into who has pricing power in the channel in the empirical application of the model we analyze a local market for two product categories refrigerated juice and tuna in both categories there are three major brands the difference between them is that the private label has an insignificant market share in the tuna category our main empirical results show that the usual games examined in the marketing literature do not hold for the given data we also nd that the retailer s market power is very significant in both these product categories and that the estimated demand and cost parameters are consistent with the estimated pattern of conduct between the manufacturers and the retailer given the evidence from the trade press of intense manufacturer competition in these categories as well as the commodity nature of these products the result of retailer power appears intuitive

looking for boy girl discrimination in household expenditure data the ability to test for discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls is hampered by a lack of data on intrahousehold distribution the analysis presented here allows inferences about intrahousehold allocation to be made from householdlevel expenditure data for a given level of income families with children will spend less on adult goods in order to purchase children s goods if household purchasing favors boys over girls smaller expenditures on adult goods would be made by families with boys as compared with those with girls a method for determining adult goods is described and the procedure for detecting gender bias is applied to data from c6te d lvoire and thailand the data show no evidence of discriminatio n between boys and girls in c6te d lvoire and a small and statistically insignificant bias in favor of boys in thailand how commodities are allocated among the members of a household has recently occasioned a good deal of interest assessments of poverty and income distribution based on household incomes or expenditures will be misleading if allocation within the household is unequal the position of women and girls has been of particular concern and there is a considerable amount of empirical evidence much of it from the indian subcontinent that documents discrimination against females see in particular bhagwati 1973 sen 1984 sen and sengupta 1983 miller 1981 bardhan 1982 and kynch and sen 1983 as well as survey papers by behrman 1987 and harriss 1987 much of the evidence is concerned with measurements of nutritional outcomes mortality and health status rather than with the direct allocation of goods by gender the difficulty in trying to determine the intrahousehold allocation of goods is that household budget surveys the obvious source of data record consumption not of individuals but of households and while attempts can be made to the author is a professor of public affairs and of economics and international affairs at princeton university and is a consultant to the population and human resources department of the world bank the author thanks dwayne benjamin who provided for excellent research assistance he is grateful to him and to members of the economic growth center at yale university for helpful comments this is a revised and shortened version of living standards measurement study working paper 39 the allocation of goods within the household adults children and gender june 1987 the results from thailand were not included in the working paper 1989 the international bank for reconstruction and development the world bank

banks as multioutput oligopolies an empirical evaluation of the retail and corporate banking markets the distinction between retail and corporate banking markets is of much importance in real life banking organizations the two markets differ with respect to concentration the importance of informational asymmetries and the extent of customer mobility within a standard conjectural variation model estimated on cost efficient banks as well as on the full sample of banks the authors empirically characterize the strategic behavior in each of these markets and also focus on cross market interactions to see whether initial moves in one market affect the equilibrium in the other market they compare their findings to the predictions that would follow from merely considering concentration ratios such as the herfindahl index

in pursuit of monopoly power recent quantitative work in industrial economics this paper reviews empirical work in industrial organization devoted to the question of inferring the existence of monopoly power from data on observed market outcomes like profits and prices the discussion covers inter industry work long conventional in the area newer developments in intra industry analysis and case studies and concludes with some remarks on a small but growing body of work assessing market dynamics the wide range of studies reviewed all generally reveal that market power exists in many industries

how serious is the neglect of intrahousehold inequality in this report the authors develop a framework for assessing the consequences of ignoring intrahousehold inequality in the measurement and analysis of poverty and inequality they apply this framework to data for the philippines and conclude that 1 the result of neglecting intrahousehold inequality will probably be considerable understatement of the levels of poverty and inequality with the philippine data measured levels of inequality and poverty were off 30 percent as a result of ignoring intrahousehold variation and 2 patterns of inequality revealed by household level data are somewhat different from patterns revealed by individual level data but the differences seem not to be dramatic to confirm these results the exercise should be repeated with data from other countries

consumption technology and the intrafamily distribution of resources adult equivalence scales reexamined adult equivalence scales are supposed to measure differences in the needs of households of different demographic composition formally they purport to measure the change in the cost of attaining a certain welfare level when the family composition varies this paper shows that the definition and the measurement of these scales depend crucially on the concept of welfare used when welfare is the utility parents derive from their own consumption one has to assume separability of parents and children s consumption this assumption implies that the only way of imputing the intrafamily allocation of resources is by observing the consumption patterns of adult goods regardless of the definition used one cannot separate the factors reflecting home technology i e needs from those determining the intrafamily distribution rule i e wants out of consumption data

competition and collusion in the american automobile industry the 1955 price war movements in total quantity and in quality adjusted price suggest a supply side shock in the american automobile market in 1955 this paper tests the hypothesis that the shock was a transitory change in industry conduct a price war the key ingredients of the test are alternative equilibrium models of oligopoly under product differentiation in nonnested cox tests of hypotheses a collusive solution is sustained in 1954 and in 1956 while a competitive solution holds in 1955 the result does not appear to be an artifact since it is robust in tests against alternative specifications copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

children s resources in collective households identification estimation and an application to child poverty in malawi children s resources matter but they are hard to identify because consumption is typically mea sured at the household level modern collective household models permit some identication of indi vidual household member resources but these models typically either ignore children or treat them as attributes of adults we propose a collective household model in which children are people with their own utility functions possibly assigned to them by parents extending the frameworks of browning chiappori and lewbel 2007 and lewbel and pendakur 2008 we show identication of children s resource shares within households we invoke semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences and use data on the household level consumption of assignable private goods to achieve identication of each individual s resource share within the household we show this without being able to observe consumption by individual household members of goods that are partly or wholly shared goods within the household further we obtain identication using only engel curves and so do not require ob served price variation in the data we estimate our model using data from malawi andnd that as the number of children in a household grows women s resource shares fall and children s resource shares rise and men s resource shares are basically unchanged we alsond evidence of gender bias against girls and observe that the resource shares of mothers and children are increasing in the education level of the mother finally we use our estimates to construct poverty indices at the person level andnd that per capita poverty indices understate the incidence of child poverty in malawi

investigating dynamic multifirm market interactions in price and advertising diagnosing the nature and magnitu de of competitive interactions among firms is important for developing effective marketing strategies in this paper we formulate a game theoretic model of firm interaction to analyze the dynamic price and advertising competition among firms in a given p roduct market firm or brand level demand functions account for the contemporaneous and carry over effects of these marketing activities and also allow for the effects of competitor actions firms take into consideration the actions of their rivals as well as their own demand and cost functions both production and advertising when determining the profit maximizing price and advertising levels our formulation enables us to quantify not only the direction and magnitude of competitive reactions but also to identify the underlying form of market conduct that generates the particular pattern of interaction we specify and estimate a fully structural econometric model for three firms constituting a distinct sub market within a personal care product category we estimate the demand and competitive interaction parameters as well as the production and advertising cost functions for each firm we then derive implications for competitive interactions and market structure interestingly we find that while firms seem to compete on advertising they price cooperatively thereby enhancing their price cost margins

economies of scale household size and the demand for food household scale economies are plausibly attributed to shared household public goods that make larger households better off at the same level of per capita resources larger households should therefore have higher per capita consumption of private goods such as food provided that they do not substitute too much toward the effectively cheaper public goods the evidence shows exactly the opposite data from rich and poor countries indicate that at constant per capita total expenditure the per capita demand for food decreases with household size and that it does so most in the poorest countries where substitution should be the least

on the expenditure dependence of children s resource shares abstract collective household models posit that each household member has access to a fraction of the household budget called a resource share which defines the shadow budget faced by a household member together with the within household shadow price vector the shadow budget determines the material well being of the household member in general it is difficult to identify resource shares from typical household level consumption data however several recent papers have shown that if resource shares do not depend on total household expenditure then identification of resource shares may proceed from commonly available engel curve data unfortunately typical datasets do not allow the testing of this restriction in this paper we use a novel italian dataset to establish that children s resource shares do not exhibit much dependence on total household expenditure thus identification of resource shares on the basis of this restriction may be valid

economic fluctuations market power and returns to scale evidence from firm level data recent research on aggregate fluctuations coupled with ongoing work in industrial organization has renewed interest in the existence magnitude and cyclical pattern of market power and the extent of increasing returns to scale by exploiting restrictions from dynamic theory and information from financial markets we present a framework for generating quantitative evidence on market power and returns to scale tailoring the econometric model to firm level panel data we calculate the percentage differential between price and marginal cost the lerner index in terms of the parameters from the econometric system results for firms in eleven industries indicate that there is a great deal of heterogeneity in the extent of market power industries with significantly positive lerner indices tend to have substantial increasing returns in the production technology we find that there is only a modest relation between our estimated lerner indices and traditional measures of market power and that when market power varies temporally it is usually procyclical thus variations in the markup of price over marginal cost may help dampen aggregate economic fluctuations

entry barriers and multiproduct oligopolies do they forebear or spoil abstract we provide a flexible method to test for a variety of multiproduct oligopolistic models and to estimate the relevance of entry conditions on industrial conduct we find that for the case of the uruguayan banking sector during the late 1970s multiproduct oligopolistic interactions were present however the partial relaxation of legal entry barriers substantially removed the multiproduct nature of these interactions

measuring multi product banks market power using the lerner index abstract the aggregate lerner index is a popular composite measure of multi product banks market power based on total assets as the single aggregate output factor we show that the aggregate lerner index only qualifies as a consistently aggregated lerner index if three conditions hold under these conditions the aggregate lerner index reduces to a weighted average of the product specific lerner indices we test the three conditions for a sample of u s banks covering the years 2011 2017 all three conditions are rejected and we show that they may cause an economically relevant bias to the aggregate lerner index depending on the economic context as a general solution we propose using the always consistently aggregated weighted average lerner index whenever a composite lerner index is needed

social segregation housing tenure and social change in dutch cities in the late 1980s contemporary debates about social polarisation and divided cities emphasise common influences on social and economic change in cities the development of a global economy and of global influences on both market systems and on public policy regimes encourages an expectation that there is a convergence in processes and policies affecting cities and a convergence in outcomes in terms of increasingly similar patterns of polarisation and division this paper considers data from britain and the netherlands relating to changes in the housing sector and to social segregation and indicates that emerging patterns are very different socio tenurial polarisation and social segregation are not as marked in the netherlands as in britain and are not changing as fast the discussion arising from these data suggests that concern with globalisation and common influences on change should be balanced with a recognition of the importance of other factors in determining the pattern and pace of change in cities within this it is important to recognise not just differences in housing finance and policy but the degree of social and income inequality and the wider functioning of the welfare state

expenditure on children a rothbarth type method consistent with scale economies and parents bargaining abstract we suggest a new methodology to estimate the share of household income accruing to children the household behavior is represented according to the collective approach that is each household member is characterized by specific preferences following the principle of the rothbarth approach the identification of the children s share requires the observation of adult specific goods our method differs from this traditional approach in that it is compatible with economies of scale as well as with parents bargaining we illustrate the method with an application to the french household budget survey

profitability concentration imports and exports the case of taiwan s midstream petrochemical industries based on an open economy oligopoly model causalities among domestic firms price cost margin pcm domestic concentration import and export shares are derived and a simultaneous equation system is established by utilizing the 1989 1997 data of taiwan s midstream petrochemical industries three stage least squares is used to estimate the system the empirical results confirm the derived results and demonstrate 1 there exist simultaneous relationships among domestic pcm domestic concentration import and export shares 2 import concentration affects domestic concentration positively but affects domestic pcm import and export shares negatively 3 diversifying international markets improves domestic firms pcm 4 domestic firms seem to be in a situation of collusion

intra household resource allocation an inferential approach if household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand with survey data on family health and nutrition in brazil the equality of parental income effects is rejected unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family s health than income under the control of a father for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger the common preference or neoclassical model of the household is rejected if unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same equality of the ratios cannot be rejected there is also evidence for gender preference mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters fathers to sons

children and household economic behavior this paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas for our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure i shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children and i restrict attention largely to western societies excerpt

household economies of scale in consumption theory and evidence household economies of scale arising from the existence of househo ld public goods increasing returns in household production and or bulk discounts are incorporated into a utility theoretic model of household demands individuals are assumed to be identical and symmetrically treated within households economies of scale parameters for five goods are estimated using the quadratic expenditu re system and data from the u s consumer expenditure survey on expenditures by all adult households results suggest the existence o f significant economies of scale in the consumption of all of the included goods with economies being especially pronounced in the consumption of shelter copyright 1988 by the econometric society

assessing the competitive interaction between private labels and national brands in this article we employ the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids and specify price reaction equations derived under the la aids specification we perform intracategory analyses using data on six individual categories as well as a pooled analysis on a sample of 125 categories and 59 geographic markets we find that consumer response to price and promotion decisions demand and firm pricing behavior supply jointly determine observed market prices and market shares further estimates of residual demand elasticities suggest that examination of partial demand elasticities alone may provide an incomplete picture of the ability of brands to raise price copyright 2000 by university of chicago press

the economics of polygyny in sub saharan africa female productivity and the demand for wives in cote d ivoire polygyny is still practiced throughout much of sub saharan africa with important social consequences this paper makes the first attempt to link african polygyny directly to the productivity of women in agriculture using micro data i develop a structural model of the demand for wives that disentangles wealth and substitution effects using a large household survey from cote d ivoire i find that marked geographic diversity in cropping patterns leads to regional variation in female labor productivity i also find that conditional on wealth men do have more wives when women are more productive that is cheaper this substitution effect may explain why polygyny declined in rural areas of cote d ivoire during agricultural development

cost of characteristics indices and household equivalence scales abstract the ratio of cost functions of demographically different households is a true cost of demographic characteristics index this index is independent of a base level of income or utility ib if and only if it equals a ratio of household equivalence scales that are themselves ib this paper analyzes the restrictions on cost functions and commodity specific equivalence scales required for the existence of ib scales and indices since scales can be price dependent the restrictions on behavior are far less severe than for ordinary engel style household scales connections between ib scales and other techniques for incorporating demographic effects into demand systems are described

an examination of market power in the intrastate long distance telephone service markets evidence from a natural experiment abstract during the preceding 2 decades state public utility commissions have experimented extensively with regulating telecommunications carriers more recently many states have more or less deregulated long distance service this paper employs a panel data set of states to examine whether the competitive conduct of long distance carriers was affected by these events a methodology is developed to estimate changes in the market conduct parameter following states decisions to price deregulate long distance service this effect is isolated by using a difference in difference estimator that compares the change in market conduct of the treatment group states deregulated during the study period to the change in market conduct of the control group states deregulated throughout the study period my hypothesis is that elimination of price regulation altered the carriers market conduct and that this change in conduct explains in part the price differences in regulated and deregulated markets the result

women s income and boy girl anthropometric status in the cote d ivoire abstract this paper examines the effects of the intrahousehold distribution of income on children s anthropometric status in the c te d ivoire we find that increases in the proportion of cash income accruing to women increases boys height for age relative to girls and that this effect is statistically significant we suggest that this result may reflect efficiency and equity concerns which in this case reinforce each other

quadratic engel curves and consumer demand this paper presents a model of consumer demand that is consistent with the observed expenditure patterns of individual consumers in a long time series of expenditure surveys and is also able to provide a detailed welfare analysis of shifts in relative prices a nonparametric analysis of consumer expenditure patterns suggests that engel curves require quadratic terms in the logarithm of expenditure while popular models of demand such as the translog or the almost ideal demand systems do allow flexible price responses within a theoretically coherent structure they have expenditure share engel curves that are linear in the logarithm of total expenditure we derive the complete class of integrable quadratic logarithmic expenditure share systems a specification from this class is estimated on a large pooled data set of u k households models that fail to account for engel curvature are found ro generate important distortions in the patterns of welfare losses associated with a tax increase