employment and output effects of observed and unobserved monetary growth the purpose of this paper is to present new evidence on the business cycle effects of contemporaneously observed and unobserved money growth the analysis builds on previous work in two ways first and most important in this paper the output and employment effects of unobserved money growth are estimated without maintained hypotheses about other sources of monetary nonneutrality this approach seems appropriate because the relation between money and business cycles is acknowledged to be not well understood for example see the discussion in grossman 1983 and barro 1984 earlier findings of neutral unobserved money growth involved test procedures that maintained either the neutrality of anticipated money growth barro and hercowitz 1980 or the neutrality of observed money growth boschen and grossman 1982 however the empirical measurement and neutrality of anticipated money growth are unsettled issues see mishkin 1982 while the empirical tests by boschen and grossman 1982 reject the neutrality of observed money growth since incomplete monetary information is a central aspect of many business cycle theories it is of considerable interest to estimate the economic impact of contemporaneously unobserved money growth without placing undue restnctions on the moneylbusiness cycle relation this approach also makes clear that tests of monetary nonneutrality due to incomplete information involve a comparison of coefficients on observed and unobserved monetary growth rather than simply a finding of positive significant coefficients on unobserved money growth

bilateral bargaining with externalities this paper provides an analysis of a non cooperative pairwise bargaining game between agents in a network we establish that there exists an equilibrium that generates a coalitional bargaining division of the reduced surplus that arises as a result of externalities between agents that is we provide a non cooperative justification for a cooperative division of a non cooperative surplus the resulting division is related to the myerson shapley value with properties that are particularly useful and tractable in applications we demonstrate this by examining buyer seller networks and vertical foreclosure

an econometric investigation of the monetary neutrality and rationality propositions from an international perspective t he combination of the natural rate of unemployment and the rational expectations hypotheses in macroeconomic models results in the now well known conclusion that anticipated short run monetary stabilization policies do not influence real economic variables this policy ineffectiveness proposition has been named the macro rational expectations mre hypothesis by modigliani 1977 as a result the implicit policy prescription is that a price level stabilization policy should be pursued the empirical validity of this conclusion is perhaps the central issue in modern stabilization theory barro 1977 1978 1981 barro and rush 1980 and leiderman 1980 have presented empirical evidence for the united states supporting this proposition however a number of recent studies have claimed that previous empirical results which support the finding that anticipated policy is neutral are flawed corrections of these problems often result in conflicting conclusions see small 1979 gordon 1979 and mishkin 1982 given the important implications of the mre hypothesis it is curious that almost all formal testing has been focused upon the united states while barro has suggested that a cross country study would be useful as far as we know only darby 1980 attempts to test whether anticipated changes in monetary policy are neutral across countries unfortunately his results suffer from problems caused by using generated regressors in addition he makes no attempt to test the individual implications of the mre hypothesis which encompasses the propositions that expectations are rational lad anticipated monetary policy does not matter in this paper we employ the methodology developed by mishkin to test the mre hypothesis in six countries canada germany italy japan the united kingdom and the united states the paper is divided into three major sections and a conclusion section ii briefly reviews mishkin s testing method in section iii the procedure employed to specify the money growth equation is discussed and these equations specified section iv presents and discusses the results of applying the method introduced in section ii in the conclusion the major findings are restated possible limitations discussed and extensions suggested

the state of the federal budget and the state of the economy further evidence simultaneous monetary and fiscal policy reaction functions are derived and estimated for the 1969 2 1984 3 period the results suggest that the reagan administration has abandoned fiscal policy as a stabilization tool furthermore although the average money growth rate declined in the reagan administration variation in the rate of money growth indicates that monetary policy has been used to combat unemployment finally monetary and fiscal policies were not coordinated during this period rather monetary and fiscal policy appear to be set by a nash equilibrium in a non cooperative game in a nash equilibrium the policy chosen by each authority maximizes its payoff given the policy choice of the other authority

on fiscal policy and the stock market this paper provides some empirical evidence on the relationship between aggregate quarterly stock prices and other macro variables including measures of monetary and fiscal policy in canada the results indicate the presence of significant lags in the reaction of stock prices to fiscal policy moves to the extent that a proxy for the fiscal policy effect on required expected return to capital was included in the model such a finding conflicts with the stock market efficiency hypothesis further tests also suggest that anticipated and unanticipated fiscal policy changes have significant lagged relationships with current stock prices the canadian stock market therefore appears to have been inefficient with respect to available information on fiscal policy copyright 1988 by ohio state university press

expected monetary changes and relative prices a look at evidence from the stock market at the heart of the natural rate theory is the assumption that fully perceived monetary growth is neutral with respect to relative price changes unfortunately there have been few attempts to test this assumption directly because the belief that active contracyclical monetary policies are not superior to friedman s constant growth rule rests upon the assumption that expected monetary changes have neutral relative price effects more evidence is needed on whether such changes are in fact neutral to this end we test the hypothesis that only the unexpected components and not the expected components of monetary changes affect relative price changes by looking at the stock market testing is done on a modification of the well known mean variance capital asset pricing model the capm specifically we modify the capm to allow for differential stock returns depending upon expected and unexpected monetary growth rates section ii explains the basic model used to test for non neutral relative price effects of monetary change section iii deals with the empirical definitions of expected and unexpected money growth section iv discusses the basic data while sections v and vi make neutrality tests of monetary growth using actual expected revisions in expected and unexpected money growths the last part summarizes the paper

money and output in latin america some tests of a rational expectations approach abstract this paper deals with the relationship between money and output in sixteen latin american countries making use of the framework of analysis elaborated by robert barro for the united states three closely interrelated hypotheses are tested 1 that the growth of the money supply is predictable in that it differs from a random walk with trend 2 that only the part of money growth which is not predicted will affect real output in the short run and 3 that as lucas has argued the slope of the phillips curve is smaller in size for countries where money and prices are less predictable

on governing multilateral transactions with bilateral contracts bilateral contracts while neither negotiated nor enforced in an integrated way are nevertheless often interrelated both economically and strategically owing to production or consumption complementarities and to asymmetric information a set of bilateral contracts forms a mechanism with special properties this mechanism forms a contract equilibrium if there is no joint incentive for a supplier and any individual customer unilaterally to alter the terms of their contract if agents preferences are risk neutral in money income and if their private information is independent then there exists a contract equilibrium that implements efficient transactions if in addition preferences are strictly concave and differentiable in goods and services and technologically feasible sets are suitably convex then this equilibrium is essentially unique

unemployment inflation and monetarism a further analysis comment in a recent paper in this review robert van order proposes an interesting simplification of the important model of jerome stein 1974 the purpose of this comment is to correct some errors in van order s analysis to relate his results to stein s later work 1976b c and to analyze the role of these papers in the current debate over the mechanisms and effectiveness of macroeconomic policy for the convenience of the reader and to simplify the necessary references to van order s paper his equations through 7 and relevant notation are reproduced g g actual and expected rates of inflation y real output f indicator of fiscal policy m m nominal and real money supply p w levels of prices and wages v velocity of circulation n growth rate of m x speed of adjustment of expected inflation 9 ratio of bonds to money functions p phillips curve f production function e aggregate demand s aggregate supply r reduced form of e and s van order s equations are as follows

does anticipated aggregate demand policy matter further econometric results a heated debate has arisen over what modigliani has dubbed the macro rational expections mre hypothesis this hypothesis embodies two component hypotheses 1 rational expectations and 2 short run neutrality i e that anticipated changes in aggregate demand will have already been taken into account in economic agents behavior and will thus evoke no output or employment response together these component hypotheses imply that deterministic feedback policy rules will have no effect on business cycle fluctuations the irrelevance of these types of policy rules is inconsistent with much previous macro theorizing as well as with the views of policymakers it is thus an extremely controversial proposition which requires a wide range of empirical research this paper is a sequel to a previous paper by the author that paper developed a methodology for testing the mre hypothesis and found that anticipated money growth does matter to the business cycle this paper extends the analyses to cases where the rate of nominal gnp growth or the inflation rate rather than money growth is the aggregate demand variable the empirical results are also negative on the mre hypothesis and its corresponding policy ineffectiveness proposition this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the state of the federal budget and the state of the economy this paper tests systematic responses of the federal budget to forecasts of inflation and unemployment estimated coefficients from fiscal policy reaction functions are examined to determine whether there are such systematic responses additionally the coefficients of these estimated fiscal policy reaction functions are used to test several hypotheses concerning fiscal policy which have been advanced in the political business cycle and public choice literatures

the non existence of pairwise proof equilibrium abstract private bilateral contracting between a supplier and competing customers admits multiple equilibria we show that requiring equilibrium to be pairwise proof immune to bilateral deviations by the supplier and any customer can imply non existence of equilibrium in normal environments

policy impacts under rational expectations abstract this paper re examines for the u s the validity of the macro rational expectations mre hypothesis in contrast to most previous studies in this area the paper a considers the potential real effects of both monetary and fiscal policies b allows for possible endogeneity of these policies and c uses a joint non linear estimation methodology to distangle the hypothesis of rationality from that of neutrality the empirical results reject the joint mre hypothesis for both policies the results also indicate that policy non neutrality is the culprit behind such rejection this evidence offers further empirical support for macro rational expectations models where monetary and fiscal policies can due to some rigidities play a key role in stabilizing the real economy

nash in nash tariff bargaining abstract we provide an equilibrium analysis of the efficiency properties of simultaneous bilateral tariff negotiations in a three country model of international trade we consider the setting in which discriminatory tariffs are allowed and we utilize the nash in nash solution concept of horn and wolinsky 1988 we allow for a general family of political economic country welfare functions and assess efficiency relative to these welfare functions we establish a sense in which the resulting tariffs are inefficient and too low so that excessive liberalization occurs from the perspective of the three countries

budget deficits money growth and causality further oecd evidence abstract this paper investigates the causal linkage between budget deficits and money growth in seven major oecd countries using multivariate granger causality tests combined with akaike s aic criterion and zellner s iterative seemingly unrelated regressions the accommodation hypothesis that deficits granger cause positive long run changes in money growth is systematically rejected across all countries the reverse hypothesis that money growth granger causes long run changes in deficits is also rejected across countries these results suggest that monetary and fiscal policies are set independently in each of the oecd countries

causality analysis and multivariate autoregressive modelling with an application to supermarket sales analysis abstract this paper describes a modelling methodology for multivariate stochastic processes the concept of multiple causality is discussed and a procedure to detect multiple causality is suggested the data of a major canadian supermarket is analyzed and a multivariate autoregressive model for this supermarket is constructed and estimated several empirical findings are reported

the effect of large government deficits on interest rates and equity returns with the current economic expansion in the united states now beginning its third year the persistence of federal government budget deficits on a historically unprecedented scale has clearly become the chief distinguishing characteristic of this business cycle both economically and politically the budget for the 1978 fiscal year submitted to congress by president reagan acknowledges that after a small improvement in 1984 the 1985 deficit will exceed even the record 208 billion mark posted in the immediate post recession environment of 1983 more important the president s new budget indi cates that even with a strong economy and even after 50 billion of proposed spending cuts the 1985 deficit will show no improvement over 1984

tests of the money neutrality and rationality hypotheses the case of japan 1973 1985 this study examines the macroeconomic rational expectations hypothesis for japan in the period 1973 1985 monthly seasonally unadjusted data and the empirical methodology utilized by frederic s mishkin 1982 are used to test the hypotheses of money neutrality and rationality of expectation formation jointly and separately two alternative methods of inducing stationarity in the output data are employed the tests reject the joint hypothes es of money neutrality and rationality as well as the separate hypothesis of money neutrality the separate hypothesis of rationality cannot be rejected copyright 1986 by ohio state university press

foreign direct investment in vertically related markets we study an mne s choice of fdi mode in a vertically related market with local input sourcing we show how the market s vertical structure and trading features affect this choice an mne s incentives to expand through cross border acquisition rather than through greenfield investment are stronger in markets with higher upstream bargaining power upstream concentration and unobservable contract terms the opposite holds in markets in which wholesale price contracts instead of two part tariffs are used our welfare analysis suggests that the host country should not always welcome fdi and should discourage fdi through acquisition investissements exterieurs directs sur les marches verticaux dans cet article nous etudions le choix d une entreprise multinationale de proceder a un investissement exterieur direct dans un marche vertical avec sources d approvisionnement locales nous montrons la facon dont la structure verticale et les caracteristiques commerciales du marche ont une incidence sur une telle decision les mesures incitatives offertes aux entreprises multinationales pour se developper par l entremise d acquisitions transfrontalieres plutot que par l investissement dans de nouvelles installations sont plus fortes sur les marches dotes d un pouvoir de negociation et d une concentration en amont plus eleves ainsi que par des conditions contractuelles non observables l inverse s observe sur les marches ou les contrats a prix de gros sont utilises en lieu et place des tarifs binomes en termes de bien etre notre analyse suggere que le pays hote ne devrait pas toujours accueillir les investissements exterieurs directs et devrait decourager ces memes investissements realises par l entremise d acquisitions

tests of rationality neutrality and market efficiency a monte carlo analysis of alternative test statistics abstract this paper examines the small sample properties of three testing strategies used to analyze the rationality monetary neutrality and market efficiency hypotheses we focus on the original two step barro test of the mre hypothesis formed entirely from ols results a test that employs the correct variance covariance formulae for these two step estimates and mishkin s fimle testing framework each test is examined under likely model respecifications the findings highlight the extensive bias incurred by drawing inferences from simple unadjusted two step estimates and reveal the relative power of all tests in identifying alternatives to the null hypotheses

autoregressive modelling and money income causality detection abstract a step wise procedure based on granger s concept of causality and abaike s final prediction error criterion is suggested as a practical means to identify the order of lags of each variable in a multivariate autoregressive process the model seems useful because it can serve as a reduced form formulation to avoid imposing often spurious or false restrictions of the model it also provides a reasonably powerful test of causality the idea is applied to u s postwar money and income data it is found that between m1 and gnp a bivariate feedback model fits the data best between m2 and gnp a one way causal model from money to income performs better diagnostic checks applied to our model seem to indicate the adequacy of our approach

the measurement and significance of the cyclically adjusted federal budget and debt this paper summarizes new measures of the cyclically adjusted federal budget and federal debt and explores the relationship of these measures of fiscal policy to macroeconomic variables during the last quarter century the first part of the paper discusses the construction of the new measures the second part presents regression evidence suggesting that the cyclically adjusted debt is related to nominal gnp interest rates and the private stock of fixed capital

upstream horizontal mergers vertical contracts and bargaining abstract we study horizontal mergers in the upstream sectors of vertically related industries when bargaining is present and contract types are endogenous we demonstrate that the contract types used can have significant implications for the equilibrium market structure and vice versa when trading takes place through two part tariff contracts merger incentives are absent however when the downstream firms are powerful merger incentives are restored since the merger leads then either to the exclusive or to the partial use of wholesale price contracts finally we show that whenever a merger occurs it is welfare detrimental

on vertical relations and the timing of technology adoption we study the timing of new technology adoption in markets with input outsourcing and thus with vertical relations we find that technology adoption can take place earlier when firms engage in input outsourcing than when they produce the input in house hence the presence of vertical relations can accelerate the adoption of a new technology we also find that particular features of a vertically related market such as the distribution of bargaining power and the contract type through which trading is conducted can crucially affect the speed of technology adoption

government deficits and aggregate demand abstract the evidence presented in this paper indicates that changes in government spending transfers and taxes can have substantial effects on aggregate demand the estimates also indicate that the promise of future social security benefits significantly reduces private saving each the basic implications of the so called ricardian equivalence theorem is contradicted by the data the results are consistent with the more general view of the effects of fiscal actions and fiscal expectations that is described in the paper

bilateral monopolies and incentives for merger the paper presents a model of duopoly in which firms acquire inputs through bilateral monopoly relations with suppliers it combines a bargaining model with a duopoly model to examine how input pri

interest rates and expected future budget deficits in the united states several recent empirical studies have found no evidence of a positive association between interest rates and current and past budget deficits one possible explanation for this finding is that interest rates are related much more to the expectation of future budget deficits than to current and past budget deficits in this paper i investigate whether this explanation is valid finding no evidence that it is section ii briefly formulates and discusses the hypothesis under consideration stating some of its implications section iii presents the results of regressing the commercial paper rate moody s aaa bond rate and the ex post real commercial paper rate on current and past government spending budget deficits and real money supplies the regressions have been fitted to the entire sample of monthly data spanning the period between june 1908 and march 1984 and to 11

aggregate consumption and the distribution of income in the united kingdom an econometric analysis blinder i975 explained this omission by arguing that with the ascendancy of the friedman 1957 and modigliani and brumberg i954 models of consumer behaviour the view that income distribution affected aggregate consumption fell into disrepute in academic circles it was supplanted by the view that marginal and perhaps even average propensities to consume are constant over the income distribution pp 447 8 the life cycle model as is well known derives the aggregate consumption function from the hypothesis that the consumer chooses the time path of consumption which maximises lifetime utility subject to the constraint that the present discounted value of all consumption plus the present discounted value of the bequest if any is equal to lifetime disposable resources a consequence of such a hypothesis is that consumption at each instant is proportional to lifetime disposable resources with the constant of proportionality dependent only on age length of life the rate of interest and tastes in their empirical work friedman and modigliani may also have had to ignore income distribution due to lack of data however blinder 1975 went on to show that even under the life cycle hypothesis provided that the marginal utility of bequests say f was different

federal deficits and money growth in the united states a vector autoregressive analysis abstract a multivariate var modelling technique is employed in this paper to test for causality between federal deficits and money growth in the united states four alternative causality hypotheses including the common accommodation view are examined in addition to the two policy variables four other related macro variables are included in the empirical analysis namely short term interest rates prices real output and exchange rates the var results consistently reject the accommodation hypothesis and indicate that monetary and fiscal policy actions are set independently in the united states other causality inferences are also obtained and their implications are discussed

why are more women working in britain in britain female labor force participation rose steadily from the second world war to 1977 to explain this we estimate a pooled time series cross section supply function for single year age groups of women the life cycle pattern is explained quite well by the presence of children at a second stage we try to explain the rising level of the cohort intercepts estimated at the first stage real wage growth may be an explanatory factor as cross section evidence suggests it should be finally we point to the 15 rise in the relative pay of women in the mid 1970s caused by the equal pay act this did not cause the expected decline in the relative demand for female employees

abuse of dominance and licensing of intellectual property patent thickets layers of licenses a firm needs to be able to offer products that embody technologies owned by multiple firms and licensing policies have drawn increasing scrutiny from policy makers patent thickets involve complementary products which gives rise to double marginalization the so called royalty stacking problem and has the potential to retard diffusion of new technologies and reduce consumer welfare this paper examines the impact of licensing policies of one or more upstream owners essential intellectual property ip on the downstream firms that require access to that ip the terms under which downstream firms can access this ip affects entry decisions product diversity prices and welfare we consider both the case in which a single party controls the essential ip and the case in which different parties control complementary pieces of essential ip we compare the outcome of several alternative standard licensing arrangements such as flat rate access fees royalty percentages per unit fees patent pools and cross licensing arrangements with or without vertical integration we first consider the case where there is a single upstream owner of essential ip increasing the number of licenses enhances product variety which creates added value but it also intensifies downstream competition which dissipates profits we derive conditions under which the upstream ip monopoly will then want to provide an excessive or insufficient number of licenses relative to the number that maximizes consumer surplus or social welfare when there are multiple owners of essential ip royalty stacking can reduce the number of the downstream licensees but also the downstream equilibrium prices the consumers face the paper derives conditions determining whether this reduction in downstream price and variety is beneficial to consumers or society finally the paper explores the impact of alternative licensing policies with fixed license fees or royalties expressed as a percentage of the price an upstream ip owner cannot control the intensity of downstream competition in contrast volume based license fees i e per unit access fees do permit an upstream owner to control downstream competition and to replicate the outcome of complete integration the paper also shows that vertical integration can have little impact on downstream competition and licensing terms when ip owners charge fixed or volume based access fees

are money growth and inflation related to government deficits evidence from ten industrialized economies abstract we present empirical evidence on the relation between the government debt growth money growth and inflation for ten industrialized countries over the post world war ii period non parametric and parametric tests reveal little evidence that government debt growth is either related to money growth or permanently related to inflation over periods of a decade or less but the level of debt is significantly associated with subsequent inflation from 1974 to 1983 these results are consistent with the hypothesis that central banks in developed economies can conduct independent monetary policy over long periods notwithstanding government deficits

upstream capacity constraint and the preservation of monopoly power in private bilateral contracting this article presents a model of private vertical contracting with a capacity constrained monopolistic supplier i consider full capacity beliefs that are consistent with an upstream capacity constraint and are wary when the constraint is tight or production is costless i show that facing a capacity constraint the supplier may preserve its monopoly power in equilibrium this result stands in sharp contrast to the standard result that the supplier cannot preserve its monopoly power which holds under the usual implicit assumption of an infinite production capacity

opportunism in multilateral vertical contracting nondiscrimination exclusivity and uniformity comment an input supplier selling to competing downstream firms would benefit from publicly committing at the outset to all contracts efficient commitment however would require complete contracts the authors study instead bilateral contracting without commitment regarding others terms each firm then fears that the supplier might opportunistically renegotiate another s contract to increase bilateral profit at the firm s expense the authors show that nondiscrimination clauses generally cannot curb such third party opportunism even with symmetric firms to reassure firms crude forms of commitment may be adopted this could explain the pervasiveness of exclusivity arrangements and the striking uniformity and intertemporal rigidity of franchise contracts copyright 1994 by american economic association

unexpected money and unemployment 1920 to 1983 in a series of papers barro 1977 1978 barro and rush 1980 vittorio and tanner 1983 bellante morrell and zardkoohi 1982 and others have tested the rational expectations hypothesis that only unexpected changes in the money supply affect real variables mishkin 1982 merrick 1983 sheehey 1984 small 1979 and others have criticized this work for various reasons none of the cnticisms however has addressed the question of possible endogeneity of the money supply m1 used moreover most of this literature uses only data from after world war ii this paper builds on the previous literature in several directions first it differs from most other work by following blejar and fernandez 1980 and rush 1985 in using the base money supply as the monetary aggregate this controls for the possible endogeneity of the m1 money supply typically used by other researchers moreover it allows the sample period to be extended through 1983 without worrying how the recently changing definitions of m1 affect any results next a longer sample period roughly from 1920 to 1983 is used this time span is interesting for a couple of reasons it allows an assessment of the role played by

does anticipated monetary policy matter an econometric investigation a heated debate has arisen over the policy ineffectiveness proposition associate with the work of lucas sargent and wallace it postulates that anticipated aggregate demand policy will have no effect on business cycle fluctuations so that one deterministic feedback policy rule is as good as any other from the point of view of stabilizing the economy this paper develops a methodology for empirically analyzing rational expectations models displaying this neutrality result and then applies it to the important question of whether anticipated monetary policy matters to the business cycle

deficits and money growth in the united states 1872 1983 abstract this paper reports empirical evidence on the relation between government budget deficits and the growth of high powered money in the united states high powered money growth appears to be positively related to war spending during periods when such spending is a substantial fraction of gnp there is little evidence that the growth of high powered money is related to the non war government deficit measured either in cash or in real terms after controlling for the level of overall economic activity

the effect of changes in britain s industrial structure on female relative pay and employment a puzzling feature of the british labour market is the fact that in the ten years since i970 both the relative earnings and the relative employment of women has risen the term relative is always used in this paper as meaning female to male the details of this rise have already been documented elsewhere and need not detain us here suffice it to say that over the economy as a whole the relative earnings of women rose by nearly i5 in the period i970 80 with owing to the operation of the equal pay act most of the increase occurring in i 973 6 concurrently the relative employment of women rose from 59 0 in i970 to 7200 in i 980 in terms of numbers and from 43 to 53 0 in terms of hours worked by way of contrast the period i950 70 saw relatively little change in either relative earnings or in relative hours worked and though there was some growth in the relative numbers employed it was not a magnitude comparable to that of i970 80 essentially two explanations have been put forward to explain this twin phenomenon of rising relative earnings and employment of women and both focus on the distinction between movements along a demand curve and shifts between demand curves thus according to zabalza and tzannatos i985 the equal pay act by raising relative earnings caused a movement along the demand curve for relative female employment however the accompanying sex discrimination act led to a displacement of the curve with the result that movements in relative earnings and employment in the post i970 period were positively related chiplin et al i 980 on the other hand argued that such shifts were to be explained by the earnings equalising effects of the flat rate provisions of incomes policies operating over i973 6 2 against this background the purpose of this paper is to test more rigorously than hitherto a third hypothesis for the same phenomenon this hypothesis argues that industries might differ in the intensity with which they used female labour relative to male labour consequently if over a given period the female

bilateral control with vertical contracts when a manufacturer contracts secretly with competing retailers he is subject to opportunism and linear or non linear tariffs may not allow the manufacturer to maintain monopoly prices to analyse the effects of rpm o brien shaffer 1992 use a concept of contract equilibrium which concentrates on pairwise deviations thereby questioning the robustness of the analysis this paper emphasises the distinction between the contract equilibrium and standard non cooperative concepts we advocate for some caution in the use of the former concept as if overlooks an inexistence problem we then confirm the intuition that rpm can help solve the manufacturer s commitment problem this confirms that o brien shaffer s insight is robust and validates the courts reluctance against rpm

the equal pay act as an experiment to test theories of the labour market the uk equal pay act of 1970 resulted in a large rise in the relative earnings of women in the early 1970s as this change unlike most wage changes was largely exogenous to employers one can think of this episode as an experiment for testing different theories of the labour market hence study of the effects of the equal pay act should be given considerable weight and is likely to have wider implications about the operation of labour markets most models of the labour market used by economists assume that employment is demand determined at least after a large positive shock to the wage these models would predict that female relative employment should have fallen after the introduction of the equal pay act yet it is hard to find evidence of this this paper argues that female relative employment did not fall because the female labour market is in part monopsonistic

buyer power and intrabrand coordination we analyze the competitive effects of vertical contracts in a contracting situation where rival retailers offer contracts to a manufacturer in contrast to bernheim and whinston 1998 who study the situation in which competing manufacturers offer contracts to a common retailer we find that two part tariffs even if contingent on exclusivity or not do not suffice to implement the monopolyoutcome richer arrangements including e g conditional fixed fees and upfront payments are thus required to internalize all contracting externalities the welfare implications are ambiguous on the one hand richer contracts ensure that no efficient retailer is excluded on the other hand they allow firms to maintain monopoly prices despite intrabrand competition simulations suggest that the latter effect may be more significant

price vs quantity competition in a vertically related market this paper demonstrates that the standard conclusions regarding the comparison of cournot and bertrand competition are reversed in a vertically related market with upstream monopoly and trading via two part tariffs in such a market downstream cournot competition yields higher output lower wholesale prices lower final prices higher consumers surplus and higher total welfare than bertrand competition

north south trade and female labour in manufacturing an asymmetry a simple method of measuring the impact of north south trade on the female intensity of manufacturing is applied to data for developed and developing countries the results confirm that growth of exports has increased the relative demand for female labour in the south however there does not appear to have been a general counterpart reduction in the relative demand for female labour in northern manufacturing even among blue collar workers there are several possible reasons for the apparent conflict between these findings and other evidence that in northern manufacturing females have been disproportionately displaced by trade with the south