estimates of the returns to quality and coauthorship in economic academia salaries of academic economists are studied to determine if individuals receive differential returns to publishing articles of varying quality and to coauthored versus single authored articles estimates based on detailed data and a flexible nonlinear least squares procedure indicate that substantial returns to quality exist and that an individual s return from a coauthored paper with n authors is approximately 1 n times that of a single authored paper

factor use and productivity change in the alcoholic beverage industries 1 introductiondemands for wine beer and spirits are in view of their substitutable nature often studied in conjunction with one another heien and pompelli 1989 nelson 1999 yet the alcoholic beverage industries are connected by similarities in their production processes and inputs as well as by the demand substitutability of their products lea and piggott 1995 these industries are therefore usefully examined together when questions about technical change and productivity growth arise little recent attention has been given to the nature of technical adjustments in the beer sector and no such work seems ever to have been published on wine and spirits 1brewing and distilling and to a smaller extent winemaking have become increasingly mechanized during the past half century as they have in most other manufacturing sectors packaging rates are higher shelf lives longer and storage and transportation technology improved tremblay 1987 elzinga 1990 pp 216 219 iserentant 1995 piggott and conner 1995 gisser 1999 the fixed costs associated with these innovations have broadly speaking served as an incentive to build fewer and larger plants industry concentration in the beer sector rose dramatically from the mid 1930s through the mid 1980s plant numbers then expanded as microbreweries catered to the new demand for product variety and idiosyncrasy although four firm concentration continued to rise through the mid 1990s in the spirits sector domiciled largely in the south distillery numbers continue to decline spurred by declining aggregate demand as well as scale economies no such broad consolidation is taking place in the wine industry where several california and new york firms long have occupied a substantial market share instead wineries numbers have grown rapidly and uninterruptedly since 1970 proliferating in regions long thought inhospitable to wine grape production growing consumer interest in wine variety and microclimates a trend similar to that for microbrews has abetted this diversification goodhue et al 2000 prices in the alcoholic beverage industries have in real terms fallen substantially in the past 40 years net prices to brewers have dropped 37 to wineries 16 and to distillers 31 at the same time real wage rates generally have risen and except for brief instability during the 1970s so have capital rental prices real material prices in all three sectors rose from the 1950s through the 1960s fell through the 1970s then recovered by the mid 1990s to their early 1970s levels relative factor prices in the beer industry broadly representative of those in the other two sectors are shown in figure 1 wage rates rose relative to both capital and material prices until 1980 thereafter wages fell relative to capital but continued to rise relative to material prices u s bureau of the census various years expenditure shares illustrated in figure 2 suggest that the beer industry is the most capital intensive of the three sectors by the mid 1990s capital expenditures represented one third of beer production costs compared to only one fifth of wine and distilling costs on the other hand raw materials constituted little more than half of beer expenses but nearly 70 of wine and distilling costs labor accounted for only 10 12 of expenditures in any of these industries figure 2 seems to suggest that at least since the mid 1970s or early 1980s capital has substituted for labor and materials in all three sectors yet as figure 1 reveals much of these share changes are accounted for by the rising relative price of capital the substantial narrowing of output input price margins in the alcoholic beverage sector suggests that the sector has become more cost efficient through either technical change scale economies improved utilization rates or other means technical changes themselves can alter potential scale economies and productive capacities and hence prospects for future variations in industry structure

citations and incentives in academic contests i consider a contest between scholars on the basis of three popular indices of citation there exist equilibria in which there are more and better quality papers in the total citations contest than in the h index contest in some cases the total citations contest yields the same quality of papers but more papers than the euclidean contest as the cost of writing a paper increases the h index is inferior to the total citations index in both the quality and quantity of papers this result is partly driven by how the number of papers constrains how the h index counts citations jel d72

broadcast advertising and u s demand for alcoholic beverages quarterly data for 1977 1994 on alcohol consumption and advertising are used to estimate a differential demand system including explanatory variables for broadcast advertising and print advertising the model explains the growth rate of per capita consumption dependent on explanatory variables for prices real income demographic changes and real advertising by media and beverage empirical results also are reported for total consumption of pure alcohol the results for the three beverages and total alcohol indicate that advertising has little or no effect on demand the empirical evidence thus supports the notion that regardless of media advertising affects mainly brand shares

the demand for beer wine and spirits a survey of the literature the demand for alcohol literature is vast and much conflicting information about the nature of the demand for alcoholic beverages has been published this paper presents a survey of the literature and then uses the technique of meta regression analysis to establish insights into the nature of the demand for beer wine and spirits unlike previous meta studies of the demand for alcoholic beverages this study adjusts for the precision of each elasticity estimate the analysis presented suggests reported elasticity estimates will be influenced by such factors as estimation technique data frequency and time period under consideration with respect to time the findings suggest that the demand for alcoholic beverages has become less inelastic since the mid 1950s and that the income elasticity has been falling since the mid 1960s the analysis also found support for the idea that alcohol as a commodity group is a necessity and that consumers respond to price discounting with inventory behaviour rather than true substitution behaviour little support is found for the idea that the demand for alcoholic beverages varies fundamentally across most countries although wine may be an exception language en

advertising effects in complete demand systems a rationale for including advertising in complete demand systems is presented an advertising analogue of the slutsky equation is derived and properties of the expenditure and indirect utility functions characterized empirical estimates of a complete demand system incorporating dynamic advertising effects support neoclassical restrictions we do not reject homogeneity or symmetry at the 1 level this represents surprisingly strong support for neoclassical theory relative to prior parametric studies

advertising and the us market demand for beer the us per capita market demand for beer is empirically estimated to determine the effect of advertising on the demand for beer the empirical results indicate that the most important determinants of demand are the price of beer the price of substitutes demographic factors and a light beer dummy variable the positive effects of income and lagged consumption appear to be small although many have argued that advertising promotes beer consumption the empirical results of this study do not support this hypothesis

estimating markups and market conduct with multidimensional product attributes we demonstrate how to estimate a model of oligopoly pricing when products are multi dimensionally differentiated we provide an empirical counterpart to recent theoretical work on product differentiation using specifications informed by economic theory we estimate price cost margins for products differentiated in many dimensions

some further results on rosen and quandt s labor market model abstract this note presents some new evidence on estimation of rosen and quandt s disequilibrium aggregate labor market model it is found that the earlier results of rosen and quandt are not robust in terms of computational aspects the specification of the minimum condition differencing and different data samples

dynamic almost ideal demand systems an empirical analysis of alcohol expenditure in ireland this paper presents a dynamic form of the almost ideal demand system aids three versions of the static aids model are employed to determine the preferred long run equilibrium model and represents the short run dynamics by an error correction mechanism this estimation procedure is then applied to alcohol expenditure in ireland the estimated point elasticities are consistent with previous studies and a priori expectations beer and spirits are found to be price inelastic in both the short and long run while wine is price inelastic in the short run and price elastic in the long run

units of measurement and the stone index in demand system estimation the stone index typically used in estimating linear almost ideal demand systems is not invariant to changes in units of measurement which may seriously affect the approximation properties of the model a modification to the stone index or use of a regular price index instead are both desirable practices in estimating linear ai models

measuring and testing advertising induced rotation in the demand curve advertising can rotate the demand curve if it changes the dispersion of consumers valuations we provide an elasticity form measure of the advertising induced demand curve rotation in five demand models and test for its presence in the us nonalcoholic beverage market the almost ideal demand system aids model reveals that doubling advertising spending rotates the demand curves clockwise for milk and coffee and tea with associated slope changes of 7 and 12 soft drink advertising rotates its demand curve counterclockwise our policy suggestion is that milk and soft drink firms time advertising to coincide with high and low price periods respectively

a class of differential demand systems abstract the rotterdam almost ideal demand system cbs and nbr models constitute a class of differential demand systems they correspond to alternative assumptions made concerning the constancy of certain parameters this paper discusses the restrictions that they impose on the evolution of demand elasticities over time

differential consumer demand systems it is shown in this paper that several well known systems like the rotterdam model and the almost ideal demand system can be seen as different parametrizations of the budget share differential equation using a third parametrization a new system called the cbs system is developed and discussed special attention is given to the relative price version of the system and in particular to the special case of preference independence some estimates for the netherlands based on time series for 1953 1981 using various approaches are presented

economic and demographic factors in australian alcohol demand in the last two decades total pure alcohol consumption in australia has declined by about 31 and currently it is at the same level as it was in the 1950s australians consumed about 10 litres of pure alcohol per person in 1982 and now the level has declined to about 7 litres of pure alcohol per person during the last four decades per capita beer consumption has reached a peak of 140 litres in 1975 and has fallen to a low 93 litres in 1999 wine consumption has increased four fold while spirits consumption has stayed around the same level this paper using the australian consumption data for beer wine and spirits for the period 1956 1999 aims to explain the change in consumption patterns of beer wine and spirits by considering the effects due to changes in economic and demographic factors the results show that while income and prices significantly influence the consumption patterns of alcohol the increasing australian elderly population also plays an important role

market power and joint dominance in u k brewing market power and joint dominance are examined in u k brewing i assess unilateral and coordinated effects where the latter is equated with joint dominance and show how one can distinguish between the two econometrically the application makes use of two demand equations the nested logit of mcfadden 1978a and the distance metric of pinkse slade and brett 2002 the two equations yield very different predictions concerning elasticities and markups nevertheless although there is evidence of market power using either demand model that power is due entirely to unilateral effects in other words neither model uncovers evidence of coordinated effects tacit collusion

economists salaries and lifetime productivity one of the advantages of studying academic labor markets is that many facets of productivity are easily measured this makes it possible to study the relationship between pay and productivity there has been some debate whether labor markets are auction markets where salaries equal expected near term productivity or are characterized by implicit long term contracts in this paper we test these propositions directly and perhaps for the first time using data from the academic labor market we show that economists salaries are best described as reflecting implicit long term contracts weiss and lillard 14 modelled the determination of academic salaries when a professor s productivity changes over time perhaps due to luck in creativity or shifts in opportunities for productive research they concluded that if there are no costs to mobility then the salary must equal the professor s immediate expected productivity competition among universities for faculty forces salaries to equal expected productivity in the near term with positive costs of mobility this spot market relationship is severed causing salaries to be less sensitive to new information about expected productivity in particular the cost of mobility creates a wedge that allows increases decreases in expected near term productivity to not always be matched by wage increases decreases in fact if mobility is sufficiently costly the contract provides perfect insurance against individual failure and a stable salary stream over time 14 162 since salary does vary over an academic s career the stable salary stream scenario is empirically irrelevant the question then is whether professors are paid according to their expected near term productivity or according to some implicit long term contract that might place a greater weight on early productivity what factors determine a faculty member s productivity in a university let us assume that universities are concerned with their contribution to the advancement of knowledge or their reputation for doing so and teaching a university s current reputation for advancing knowledge depends on its current publications and citations 1 a university is not directly interested in re

mergers with differentiated products the case of the ready to eat cereal industry traditional merger analysis is difficult to implement when evaluating mergers in industries with differentiated products i discuss an alternative which consists of demand estimation and the use of a model of postmerger conduct to simulate the competitive effects of a merger i estimate a brand level demand system for ready to eat cereal using supermarket scanner data and use the estimates to 1 recover marginal costs 2 simulate postmerger price equilibria and 3 compute welfare effects under a variety of assumptions the methodology is applied to five mergers two of which occurred and for which i compare predicted to actual outcomes

academic wage structure by gender the roles of peer review performance and market forces we focus on understanding the role of productivity in determining wage structure differences between men and women in academia the data arise from a pay equity study carried out in a single midwestern u s university over the 1996 1997 academic year econometric results confirm that external market forces exert influence over both male and female salary but peer review ratings play a significant role in male but not female earnings determination with similar results for objective measures of research teaching and service

the effects of banning advertising in junk food markets we develop a structural model to analyze the eects of banning advertising on market equilibria and welfare in junk food markets we consider the impact on demand and prices and show how to quantify welfare eects when advertising might lead consumers to take decisions that are inconsistent with their underlying preferences we use transaction level data on the potato chips market and nd that banning advertising leads to a direct reduction in demand but also toughens price competition leading to lower prices and increased demand welfare increases as consumers benet from no longer making distorted

price competition in u s brewing this study utilizes a brand level dataset that captures a unique natural experiment a 100 increase in the excise tax to evaluate different pricing models in the u s beer industry to assess the plausibility of different models the increase in marginal cost resulting from the tax increase is exploited observed prices in the post increase period are compared to the prices that should be observed under various pricing models three types of models are analyzed bertrand nash leadership and collusion results indicate that extreme cases of collusion can be confidently ruled out while several models may explain the observed prices equally well

measuring market power in the ready to eat cereal industry the ready to eat cereal industry is characterized by high concentration high price cost margins large advertising to sales ratios and numerous introductions of new products previous researchers have concluded that the ready to eat cereal industry is a classic example of an industry with nearly collusive pricing behavior and intense nonprice competition this paper empirically examines this conclusion in particular i estimate price cost margins but more importantly i am able empirically to separate these margins into three sources i that which is due to product differentiation ii that which is due to multi product firm pricing and iii that due to potential price collusion the results suggest that given the demand for different brands of cereal the first two effects explain most of the observed price cost margins i conclude that prices in the industry are consistent with noncollusive pricing behavior despite the high price cost margins leading firms are able to maintain a portfolio of differentiated products and influence the perceived product quality it is these two factors that lead to high price cost margins

scholarships citations and salaries economic rewards in economics while substantial attention has been paid to the determinants of academics earnings 5 7 8 14 15 this literature has by implication suggested that the mere fact of having spent more time in the profession and the publication of more scholarly articles and books are the major determinants of salary differences our purpose here is to introduce a new determinant the quality of one s scholarly research measured by the frequency of references to that work as an additional objective measure of productivity we expect that this proxy for the extent of a scholar s influence on the work of other researchers is rewarded by the market in addition to giving a more complete picture of the determination of salaries in academic labor markets our approach should be useful in establishing a better framework for the evaluation of issues of discrimination in such markets than has been presented before 2 9

monopolistic competition and preference diversity approach our model is especially attractive because it starts from economic primitives a specification of the set of possible individual preference patterns it shows how specific properties of the distribution of preferences translate into properties of aggregate demand this allows us to understand the relationship between the distribution of preferences and the degree to which the market introduces biases in product selection this paper presents a general model of the demand for differentiated products which has as special cases two of the most popular approaches used to analyse welfare and competition in monopolistically competitive markets the model of spatial competition on the circle and the model of symmetric aggregate demand the circle model is attractive because both demand and costs have a definite and easy to visualize physical foundation and because it is tractable salop 1979 provides an exemplary modem analysis with this model one can analyze the relationship between the optimal amount of product variety and the amount which a monopolistically competitive market will support in many plausible cases competition produces too much variety such a strong conclusion raises questions of robustness almost simultaneously spence 1976 and dixit and stiglitz 1977 developed an alternative approach to monopolistic competition based upon the chamberlinian assumption of symmetry see also shubik 1959 rather than specifying a distribution of preferences and deriving demand through aggregation as did salop and his predecessors these authors started by specifying a symmetric aggregate benefit function indicating how social welfare depends on the amounts of the various products supplied both spence and dixit stiglitz were able to show that the welfare conclusions from the circle model were not robust depending on the functional form of the benefit function equilibrium may entail either excessive or insufficient product variety 1 the assumption of symmetric demand has proven fruitful in the analysis of many economic problems it is therefore natural to ask what distribution of tastes would give

the demand for beer wine and spirits a systemwide analysis the systemwide approach to the analysis of consumer demand considers the multivariate structure of the problem in which the consumer allocates his income to all goods simultaneously this approach combines the theory of the consumer with empirical analysis and has enjoyed much popularity over the past decade for surveys of these developments see brown and deaton 1972 phlips 1974 powell 1974 theil 1975 76 1980 barten 1977 and theil and clements 1980 most previous applications of the systemwide approach have used national accounts commodity groups food clothing housing and so on for many business and government policy purposes however these groups are much too broad for example to analyze the effects on consumption of all but the simplest changes in indirect taxes we would need considerably more disaggregation similarly market researchers need to analyze demand at the individual product level for purposes of forecasting and formulating pricing and other policies the objective of this paper is to use the consumption of beer wine and spirits to illustrate how the approach can be apthis paper illustrates how the systemwide approach to consumer demand can be extended so that it can be applied to narrowly defined commodity groups we use the consumption of beer wine and spirits to show how the approach can be applied to estimate income and price elasticities of demand when the consumer s utility function is appropriately separable in alcoholic beverages and all other goods it is possible to confine our attention to the three beverages and ignore all other goods we use the demand model for a number of simulations designed to analyze the rapid growth of wine consumption we are indebted to john davis peter goldschmidt and kal stening for excellent research assistance to michael wohlgenant and henri theil for helpful comments and discussion and to the new south wales drug and alcohol authority for their partial financial support of this research

mergers brand competition and the price of a pint abstract mergers in the uk brewing industry have reduced the number of national brewers from six to four the number of brands in contrast has remained relatively constant we analyze the effects of mergers on brand competition and pricing brand level demand equations are estimated from a panel of draft beers to model brand substitution possibilities we estimate the matrix of cross price elasticities semiparametrically our structural model is used to assess the strength of brand competition along various dimensions and to evaluate the mergers in particular we compute equilibria of pricing games with different numbers of players

advertising and us alcoholic beverage demand system wide estimates the effects of advertising on consumption of alcoholic beverages in the us are analysed the goal is to obtain evidence on the importance of advertising at the level of beverage demand beer wine spirits and for total consumption of alcohol per capita gallons of ethanol a three equation conditional demand system is estimated that includes own and cros beverage advertising as explanatory variables four models of the differential demand system are estimated including the rotterdam aid cbs and nbr models using annual us data for the period 1964 90 on beverage consumption prices expednitures and real advertising estimates are obtained of the complete matrix of own and cross elascities for each beverage price and advertising at the beverage level the results indicate a positive butr very small effect of advertising on beverage consumption with most of the impact due to wine advertising and non due to beer advertising there is no efect of advertising in the composite demand function for al

demand for differentiated products price and advertising evidence from the u s beer market abstract this paper employs a nation wide sample of supermarket scanner data to estimate a large brand level demand system for beer in the u s using the distance metric method of pinkse slade and brett pinkse j slade m brett c 2002 spatial price competition a semiparametric approach econometrica 70 1111 1155 unlike previous studies this work estimates the own and cross advertising elasticities in addition to price elasticities positive and negative cross advertising elasticities imply the presence of both cooperative and predatory effects of advertising expenditures across brands however the former effect appears to dominate suggesting that advertising increases the overall demand for beer we discuss the implications of these results in this industry

informative advertising in differentiated oligopoly markets abstract this paper examines the welfare implications of informative advertising in differentiated product oligopoly markets the analysis reconciles the conflicting results in previous studies that find advertising to be undersupplied in homogeneous product markets but oversupplied in differentiated product markets when the degree of differentiation is small in equilibrium purely informative advertising is undersupplied when brands are sufficiently close substitutes and oversupplied when brands are more differentiated product differentiation also has welfare implications for the effect of technological change in the advertising sector in response to an advertising cost innovation equilibrium prices fall and the market converges to the socially optimal resource allocation for brands that are sufficiently close substitutes whereas equilibrium prices rise and divergence occurs when brands are more differentiated

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

cross country alcohol consumption comparison an application of the rotterdam demand system this paper analyses the consumption patterns of the three beverages beer wine and spirits in nine countries australia canada finland japan new zealand norway sweden the uk and the us using the rotterdam demand system a cross country comparison of the results shows that in most countries i wine consumption has grown at a fasteer rate than beer and spirits ii the proportion of consumers expenditure on alcohol is declining iii beer is a necessity and spirits is a luxury iv the demand for the three beverages is price inelastic and iv all three beverages are pair wise substitutes we also investigated the hypothesis of identical parameters for all countries by pooling the data across countries and found that the data do not support the hypothesis

further results on aggregation of differential demand equations barnett 1979a 1981 theil s extending 1971 work aggregates differential demand equations in absolute undeflated prices this paper extends further these results by deriving aggregate macro demand equations in relative prices under stated assumptions these equations are analogous to the individual consumer s micro demand equations and the properties of the microcoefricients carry over

an applied analysis of brand demand structure the demand literature is concerned with the optimal allocation of expenditure at varied but usually high levels of commodity aggregation much less aggregation however is required for business applications in applied business settings interest centres upon the different brands of the same commodity because policy formulation takes place at the level of the individual brand this paper considers application of formal demand analysis to brand demand data a theoretically plausible demand system is invoked to describe inter brand allocation of expenditure test restrictions imposed by economic theory and yield empirically determined insights into brand demand structure

on the extent of the market wholesale gasoline in the northeastern united states this paper develops the classical view of the extent of markets by introducing explicitly in the analysis the concept of arbitrage costs arbitrage or transaction costs imply that market boundaries are essentially stochastic while a set of products or regions may have binding arbitrage conditions i e may be in the same market at a given point in time they may not at another thus in defining a market the probability that a set of agents or regions would h3ve binding arbitrage conditions has to be assessed this paper develops an econometric methodology to estimate the transaction costs required to arbitrage among a given set of products as well as the probability that that set of products would be bound by binding arbitrage condi tions finally the methodology is applied to wholesale gasoline in the northeastern part of the united states address for communications pablo t spiller herbert hoover memorl l bldg 9348 stanford ca 94305

alcohol consumption and alcohol advertising bans the purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the relationship between alcohol advertising bans and alcohol consumption most prior studies have found no effect of advertising on total alcohol consumption a simple economic model is provided which explains these prior results the data set used in this study is a pooled time series of data from 20 countries over 26 years the empirical model is a simultaneous equations system which treats both alcohol consumption and alcohol advertising bans as endogenous the primary conclusions of this study are that alcohol advertising bans decrease alcohol consumption and that alcohol consumption has a positive effect on the legislation of advertising bans the results indicate that an increase of one ban could reduce alcohol consumption by 5 to 8 the alcohol price elasticity is estimated at about 0 2 the results suggest that recent exogenous decreases in alcohol consumption will decrease the probability of enactment of new bans and undermine the continuance

further evidence on estimation of a disequilibrium aggregate labor market that final demand of 55 units for commodity one generates 45 29 units of pollution and final demand of 30 units for commodity two generates 18 44 units of pollution from the appropriate elements in the last row of the inverse we can calculate the coefficients of pollution generated per unit of final demand these coefficients are 0 823 for commodity one and 0 615 for commodity two it should be pointed out that the allocation of total pollution in 12 differs from that given by leontief because he subdivides the total according to gross output figures rather than by final demand references

unemployment insurance and labor supply and demand a time series analysis for the united states abstract a disequilibrium model of the u s labor market in which the unemployment insurance system plays a key role is estimated an increase in the level of real unemployment benefits markedly lowers employment and raises real wages

the evolution of the scientific productivity of highly productive economists this paper studies the evolution of research productivity of a sample of economists working in the best 81 departments in the world in 2007 the main novelty is that in so far as a productivity distribution can be identified with an income distribution we measure productivity mobility in a dynamic context using an indicator inspired in an income mobility index suggested by fields 2010 for a two period world productivity is measured in terms of publications weighted by the citation impact of the journals where each article is published in the periodical literature we study the evolution of average productivity productivity inequality the extent of rank reversals and productivity mobility for seven cohorts as well as the population as a whole we offer new evidence confirming previous results about the heterogeneity of the evolution of productivity for top and other researchers however the major result is that contrary to what was expected for our sample of very highly productive scholars the effect of rank reversals between the two periods on overall productivity mobility offsets the effect of an increase in productivity inequality from the first to the second period in the youngest five out of seven cohorts jel a11 a12 b41 d63 i32

a tear in the iron curtain the impact of western television on consumption behavior this paper examines the impact of exposure to foreign media on the economic behavior of agents in a totalitarian regime we study private consumption choices focusing on former east germany where differential access to western television was determined by geographic features using data collected after the transition to a market economy we find no evidence of a significant impact of previous exposure to western television on aggregate consumption levels however exposure to western broadcasts affects the composition of consumption biasing choices in favor of categories of goods with high intensity of pre reunification advertisement the effects vanish by 1998

temporal aggregation the data interval bias and empirical estimation of bimonthly relations from annual data in an important study reviewing the literature on econometric studies of the relationship between advertising and sales clarke clarke darral g 1976 econometric measurement of the duration of advertising effects on sales j marketing res 13 november 345 357 concluded that the implied duration interval of the effects of advertising on sales were too long when the studies used annual data a theoretical explanation is provided here for the observation of parameter estimates which vary with the data interval employed in the analysis parameter estimates are developed on the basis of data aggregated at various levels of temporal aggregation and compared with theoretical values it is demonstrated that it is possible to recover bimonthly parameters when only annual data are available

promotion and fast food demand many believe that fast food promotion is a significant cause of the obesity epidemic in north america industry members argue that promotion only reallocates brand shares and does not increase overall demand we study the effect of fast food promotion on market share and total demand by estimating a discrete continuous model of fast food restaurant choice and food expenditure that explicitly accounts for both spatial and temporal determinants of demand estimates are obtained using a unique panel of canadian fast food consumers the results show that promotion primarily increases demand and has a smaller effect on restaurant market shares

spatial price competition a semiparametric approach we investigate the nature of price competition among firms that produce differentiated products and compete in markets that are limited in extent we propose an instrumental variables series estimator for the matrix of cross price response coefficients demonstrate that our estimator is consistent and derive its asymptotic distribution our semiparametric approach allows us to discriminate among models of global competition in which all products compete with all others and local competition in which products compete only with their neighbors we apply our semiparametric estimator to data from u s wholesale gasoline markets and find that in this market competition is highly localized

advertising brand loyalty and pricing i consider an oligopoly model where prior to price competition firms invest in persuasive advertising and induce brand loyalty in consumers who would otherwise buy the cheapest alternative on the market this setting in which persuasive advertising is introduced to homogenous product markets provides an alternative explanation for price dispersion phenomena despite ex ante symmetry the equilibrium profile of advertising outlays is asymmetric it follows that endogenously determined brand loyal consumer bases are not symmetric across firms this raises a robustness question regarding varian s model of sales where symmetry is exogenously assumed

by ounce or by calorie the differential effects of alternative sugar sweetened beverage tax strategies the obesity epidemic and excessive consumption of sugar sweetened beverages have led to proposals of economics based interventions to promote healthy eating in the united states targeted food and beverage taxes and subsidies are prominent examples of such potential intervention strategies this paper examines the differential effects of taxing sugar sweetened beverages by calories and by ounces on beverage demand to properly measure the extent of substitution and complementarity between beverage products we developed a fully modified distance metric model of differentiated product demand that endogenizes the cross price effects we illustrated the proposed methodology in a linear approximate almost ideal demand system although other flexible demand systems can also be used in the empirical application using supermarket scanner data the product level demand model consists of 178 beverage products with combined market share of over 90 the novel demand model outperformed the conventional distance metric model in non nested model comparison tests and in terms of the economic significance of model predictions in the fully modified model a calorie based beverage tax was estimated to cost 1 40 less in compensating variation than an ounce based tax per 3 500 beverage calories reduced this difference in welfare cost estimates between two tax strategies is more than three times as much as the difference estimated by the conventional distance metric model if applied to products purchased from all sources a 0 04 cent per kcal tax on sugar sweetened beverages is predicted to reduce annual per capita beverage intake by 5 800 kcal

taxing to control social costs the case of alcohol whether taxation of alcoholic beverages is an appropriate means of reducing social costs of alcohol consumption is a continuing public policy issue some argue that the public health costs and other external costs associated with the consumption of alcoholic beverages are so significant as to justify substantial excise taxes on those beverages others counter that a tax on alcohol would reduce consumption indiscriminately and therefore reduce the satisfaction experienced by millions of sensible drinkers without necessarily reducing the harm caused by a few excessive drinkers 2 this paper presents and applies a framework for evaluating these two views of the efficiency welfare effects of alcohol taxes determining the efficiency implications of alcohol taxes is complicated by the question of whether and how much abusers especially alcoholics benefit from alcohol consumption standard welfare theory assumes that all consumers of alcohol enjoy positive net benefits consumer surplus however it is possible that alcoholics over consume in the sense that consumer surplus from their

advertising and consumer demand a differential approach abstract this paper uses a differential approach to derive demand equations to deal with advertising and show that the demand equations are natural extensions of the usual differential demand equations

demand for differentiated products discrete choice models and the characteristics approach we propose a specific characteristics framework in order to construct linkages between alternative conceptual approaches to modelling product differentiation first it is shown that a demand system which satisfies the gross substitutes property imposes specific requirements on the locations of products in particular the dimension of the characteristics space must be larger than or equal to the number of products minus one we then identify a method for casting a given demand system subject to certain restrictions into our characteristics framework this is illustrated for the logit probit and linear probability models of discrete choice theory finally we find a characteristics representation of the ces representative consumer

the impact of market clearing assumptions and dynamics on demand elasticities abstract this paper establishes support for the empirical regularity that model specifications which assume market clearing produce more elastic impact demand price elasticities than their disequilibrium counterparts specification error analysis helps explain this regularity the regularity is shown to be only a short run phenomenon

differential demand systems a further look at barten s synthesis barten s synthetic model is attractive to applied researchers since it is useful for testing the adequacy of the competing functional forms of differential demand systems including the popular rotterdam and almost ideal demand systems this article shows that the synthetic model is not a mere artificial composite of the known differential demand systems as it has been considered but rather viewed as a model in its own right it is demonstrated that at the individual consumer level barten s model has the same marginal budget shares as generated by specific forms of engel curves formulated by the box cox transformation

alcohol advertising bans consumption and control policies in seventeen oecd countries 1975 2000 this article uses cross country panel data to study the effects of advertising bans and other control policies on alcohol demand the null hypothesis is that advertising bans do not decrease alcohol consumption the study addresses several shortcomings in four previous cross country studies first an explanatory variable is included for other alcohol control policies second the study examines the history of advertising bans in oecd countries third the study also examines differences in cross country trends that characterize developed countries including aging of the population increased tourism higher unemployment rates and increased consumption of wine the mediterranean wine drinking countries are shown to be categorically distinct from the beer drinking countries and nordic spirits drinking countries fourth the study examines the panel data for unit roots and employs model specifications that correct for nonstationary data the empirical results indicate a significantly negative effect for th

the macroeconomic relationship between advertising and consumption profit maximizing firms advertise in order to increase the demand for the goods they produce hence we would expect increases in a firm s advertising to be associated with increases in consumption of the firm s goods ceteris paribus the increased demand for the firm s goods may be associated with decreased demand of their rivals goods at the market level increases in advertising by the industry may not be accompanied by increased consumption of the industry s output this is because changes in the levels of advertising among firms in a particular industry could merely rearrange market shares if this is true then in that industry a firm which increases its advertising relative to its rivals will gain sales at the rivals expense advertising in this case is a zero sum game when we aggregate across markets to consider advertising at the national level the question of the effect of advertising upon consumption has still different implications if increased advertising levels for the economy are associated with increased consumption this suggests that consumers are increasing current consumption at the expense of future consumption i e savings if this is true then advertising affects aggregate consumption and the business cycle in this paper we consider the relationship between aggregate advertising and aggregate consumption while previous research e g ashley granger and schmalensee 2 and schmalensee 24 has suggested that consumption affects advertising most previous empirical studies of the causal relationship between aggregate advertising and aggregate consumption reject the hypothesis that advertising affects consumption 6 section 8 3 12 an early study was verdon mcconnell and roesler 28 who studied the relationship between advertising and aggregate demand gnp while they found advertising to be pro cyclical and to have a positive effect on aggregate demand correlations between various leads and lags led them to conclude that no clear pattern existed this study was followed by ekelund and gramm 14 who faulted the verdon mcconnell and roesler study for considering the relationship between advertising and aggregate demand instead ekelund and gramm concentrated upon the relationship between advertising and

citations in economics measurement uses and impacts i describe and compare sources of data on citations in economics and the statistics derived from them constructing data sets of the post publication citation histories of articles published in the top five journals in the 1970s and 2000s i examine distributions and life cycles of citations compare citation histories of articles in different subspecialties in economics and present evidence on the history and heterogeneity of those journals impacts and the marginal citation productivity of additional coauthors i use a new data set of the lifetime citation histories of over 1 000 economists from thirty universities to rank economics departments by various measures and demonstrate the importance of intra and interdepartmental heterogeneity in productivity throughout the discussion summarizes earlier work including the impacts of citations on salaries and nonmonetary rewards and how citations reflect judgments about research quality in economics and the importance of economic ideas