a principal agent problem with heterogeneous demand distributions for a carbon capture and storage system abstract mechanism design problems optimize contract offerings from a principal to different types of agents who have private information about their demands for a product or a service we study the implications of uncertainty in agents demands on the principal s contracts specifically we consider the setting where agents demands follow heterogeneous distributions and the principal offers a menu of contracts stipulating quantities and transfer payments for each demand distribution we present analytical solutions for the special case when there are two distributions each taking two discrete values as well as a method for deriving analytical solutions from numerical solutions we describe one application of the model in carbon capture and storage systems to demonstrate various types of optimal solutions and to obtain managerial insights

entrepreneurship versus joblessness explaining the rise in self employment a large share of the workforce throughout the developing world is self employed and this proportion has increased in recent decades assessments of this development vary with pull factors such as high returns to capital contrasted with push factors such as barriers to more desirable salaried jobs using a long panel dataset from ghana we empirically investigate the changing structure of earnings in self employment relative to salaried work our analysis allows workers to sort into self employment for different reasons including expected earnings differentials and endogenous capital accumulation whilst highlighting constraints that workers may face we estimate a correlated random coefficient model using iv gmm taking into account the endogeneity of sector choice and capital accumulation we find that returns to productive characteristics in self employment have increased significantly between 2004 and 2011 whilst self employment has attracted increasingly skilled workers this points against the negative view of self employment as an occupation of last resort

on the effects of downstream entry we study the effects of entry in a downstream market where firms e g compaq and ibm cvs and safeway buy an input e g microprocessor grocery items from an upstream supplier e g intel procter gamble and sell their output to consumers we show demand conditions where contrary to conventional wisdom entry of a new downstream firm lowers the downstream market output and increases the consumer price thus consumers may be better off with fewer sellers in such markets we also show that this entry may cause the profit of each incumbent downstream firm to i remain unchanged ii decrease or iii even increase also for a class of widely used demand conditions the supplier s optimal price is shown invariant to the entry exit of its downstream buyer firms we classify all possible effects of downstream entry in terms of fundamental market demand conditions

supply chain competition with multiple manufacturers and retailers we study competition in a supply chain where multiple manufacturers compete in quantities to supply a set of products to multiple risk averse retailers who compete in quantities to satisfy the uncertain consumer demand for the symmetric supply chain we give closed form expressions for the unique equilibrium we find that provided there is a sufficiently large number of manufacturers and retailers the supply chain efficiency the ratio of the aggregate utility in the decentralized and centralized chains can be raised to 1 by inducing the right degree of retailer differentiation also risk aversion results in triple marginalization retailers require a strictly positive margin to distribute even when they are perfectly competitive because otherwise they are unwilling to undertake the risk associated with the uncertainty in demand for the asymmetric supply chain we show how numerical optimization can be used to compute the equilibria and we find that the supply chain efficiency may drop sharply with the asymmetry of either manufacturers or retailers we also find that the introduction of asymmetric product assortment reduces the degree of competition among retailers and thus has an effect similar to that of reducing the number of retailers we show that unlike in the symmetric chain the asymmetric chain efficiency depends on product differentiation and risk aversion because of the interaction between these features and the asymmetry of manufacturers and retailers

internal pricing and cost allocation in a model of multiproduct competition with finite capacity increments internal prices are used in practice to allocate central resources to a firms profit centers the fixed costs of capacity acquisitions are often included in these prices we examine the interaction between capacity acquisition and competition when capacity is available in fixed increments we find predictably that if the increments are small unit capacity cost is a good approximation for the internal price and if the increments are large the internal price is zero however the relationship between the internal price and the capacity increment for intermediate cases is quite irregular to the extent that it is not possible to approximate the internal price with accounting data the analysis also suggests that full cost allocation overcharges for the opportunity cost of capacity furthermore the right internal price does not act either as a way of recovering fixed costs or as a proxy for externalities such as congestion costs the conclusions are not materially altered in the case where variable costs increase at the margin and where these costs rather than hard capacity constraints are the reason to restrict output

horizontal carrier coordination through cooperative governance structures this paper examines how governance structures found in the trucking industry impact the coordination between a forwarder and its carriers including three cases no forwarder coordination direct contracting with shippers investor owned coordination price only contract and carrier cooperative coordination revenue sharing contract the carriers are engaged in a cournot competition where they decide upon service provision and truck investment economic theory predicts that integration of firms under oligopolistic competition always leads to a more efficient supply chain in the sense that prices decrease and quantities increase which reduces total profits this suggests that the benefit of avoiding double marginalization does not outweigh the benefit of upstream competition in the successive oligopoly case whereas both integrated and independent firms coexist the integrated chains do perform better in this paper we examine the interaction between governance structures a key decision when managing supply chains including that found in the trucking industry and shippers willingness to procure trucking services instead of producing them using a private fleet we find that cooperative governance can contribute to improved service provision reduced service price improved consumer surplus and improved profit for the carriers in equilibrium we use parameter values based on the swedish trucking industry and a larger grocery retailer acting as shipper to numerically illustrate the impact of different governance structures

on the optimality of the full cost pricing abstract this article is aimed at defining the full cost pricing as a leader follower game in two tier organizations i the upstream unit fixes the production capacity and uses it as a cost driver to compute the average cost ii the downstream unit operates on the market and chooses the output level on the basis of the average cost in the cournot oligopoly case the full cost pricing is compared with other pricing rules there exists a wide range of values of the fixed cost for which the full cost pricing dominates any other pricing rules in terms of gross profit

managing supply uncertainty under supply chain cournot competition abstract we study the cournot competition between two supply chains that are subject to supply uncertainty each supply chain consists of a retailer and an exclusive supplier which has random yield we examine how the levels of supply uncertainty and competition intensity affect the equilibrium decisions of ordering quantity contract offering and centralization choice we show that a retailer should order more if its competing retailer s supply becomes less reliable or if its own supply becomes more reliable a supply chain with reliable supply can take great advantage of the high supply risk of its competing chain furthermore for decentralized chains we characterize the optimal wholesale price contracts with linear penalty under different supply risks and competition scenarios finally we show that supply chain centralization is a dominant strategy and it always makes the customers better off nevertheless if the supply risk is low and the chain competition is intensive centralization could actually decrease the supply chain profit compared with the case where both chains do not choose centralization this results in a prisoner s dilemma on the other hand if the supply risk is high and or the competition level is low centralization always increases the supply chain profit the desirability of supply chain centralization is enhanced by high supply uncertainty or low chain competition

are unemployment and out of the labor force behaviorally distinct labor force states this paper tests the hypothesis that the classifications unemployed and out of the labor force are behaviorally meaningless distinctions this hypothesis is rejected distinct behavioral equations govern transitions from out of the labor force to employment and from unemployment to employment the evidence reported in this paper is broadly consistent with versions of search theory in which unemployment is a state that facilitates the job search process in an appendix we demonstrate that log concavity of the wage offer distribution implies that the exit rate from unemployment is an increasing function of the rate of arrival of job offers

equilibrium analysis of supply chain structures under power imbalance abstract this paper investigates the implications of channel power on supply chain stability in a setting where multiple suppliers sell substitutable products through a common retailer such supply chains have been traditionally analyzed as one or two stage stackelberg non cooperative games with all suppliers sharing balanced equal decision making power in this paper we relax this assumption and formulate game theoretic models to examine scenarios where one supplier can act as the stackelberg leader consequently we analyze new supply chain structures and introduce the notion of structure dominance a novel approach to analyze the performance of supply chains that has practical implications thus a decision maker can employ the concepts of structure dominance to determine whether there exist supply chain scenarios that are more stable than others i e less prone to power reconfigurations at both agent and group level we find that power imbalance causes significant declines in supply chain profits and the more balanced the agents are the higher their profits when demand is linear regardless of product competition it develops that neither the manufacturer stackelberg nor the retailer stackelberg supply chains are stable structures in our generalized setting but that structures where power is equally split between agents provide for best stability and performance

leadership and competition in network supply chains this paper considers network supply chains with price dependent demand by modelling them as large acyclic networks such large networks are common in the automobile and apparel industries we develop a model to analyze the effect of these large scale problems involving long sequences of contracts and show that contract leadership as well as leader position in the network affect the performance of the entire supply chain we generalize spengler spengler j 1950 vertical integration and anti trust policy j political econom 58 347 352 to a game on a contract tree for a particular supply chain and extend the concept of double marginalization so that it can be applied in the form of a transformation to each contract that is offered by one member to another in the contract tree we construct an algorithm to find the equilibrium solution and derive the optimal location of the leader optimal being the leader location that maximizes total supply chain profits our work formalizes many intuitive insights for example member profits are determined by systemwide rather than individual costs finally we model cournot competition between competing supply chains both two heterogeneous trees and multiple identical trees and show the effect of changes in leader position as well as cost structure on the equilibrium

entry in monopoly market this paper develops new empirical models of market concentration from game theoretic models of entry we construct our models from inequality conditions that describe entrants equilibrium strategies in simultaneous move and sequential move games and use them to study the effects of entry in isolated monopoly markets for new automobiles from estimates of the market size necessary to support one and two dealers we conclude that monopoly dealers do not block the entry of a second dealer we also find that entry does not cause price cost margins to fall by much

contracting and information sharing under supply chain competition we investigate contracting and information sharing in two competing supply chains each consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer the two supply chains are identical except they may have di

the effects and incentive of vertical mergers an analysis from the view of om abstract we investigate the effects and incentive of vertical mergers in a supply chain with three types of firms i e suppliers manufacturers and integrated firms integrated firms can sell both intermediate and final goods while suppliers and manufacturers can sell only intermediate or final goods respectively whether selling intermediate goods to other manufacturers is introduced as the integrated firms endogenous decisions we find that a vertical merger always decreases the price of final products both the production quantity and the profits of each unintegrated manufacturer and integrated firm and most of the time leads to a drop in the total profit of the supply chain while it always results in a rise in the quantity of final products and social welfare second we find that market foreclosure only happens when competition among integrated firms is weak and vertical mergers occur only when competition among unintegrated manufacturers is weak finally we provide a theoretical explanation for the phenomenon of merger waves with the aid of our model

the informal sector wage gap new evidence using quantile estimations on panel data abstractwe estimate the informal formal sector pay gap throughout the conditional wage distribution using panel data from brazil mexico and south africa we control for time invariant unobservables and identification stems from intersector movers we control for observables in a nonlinear way using propensity score reweighting and carefully check for potential measurement errors using similar definitions of informality we obtain consistent results for all three countries informally employed workers earn much less than formal workers primarily because of lower observable and unobservable skills estimates of the conditional wage gap show that they are also underpaid compared to their formal sector counterparts in all three countries the informal wage penalty is larger in the lower part of the conditional distribution and tends to disappear at the top i e the informal sector increases wage dispersion the magnitudes of these effects vary across countries with the largest penalties in lower cond

labor market integration in urban ethiopia 1994 2004 abstractan analysis of panel data on individuals in a random selection of urban households in ethiopia reveals large sustained and unexplained earnings gaps between public and private and formal and informal sectors over 1994 2004 at the same time we find first that the rate of mobility increased in the two pairs of sectors sample transitions rates grew across survey waves while state dependence in sector choice decreased second the correlation between sector choice and earnings gaps increased over the same period in particular the correlation between comparative earnings and selection into the informal sector was high throughout the survey decade and increased in magnitude over the second half of the period these results suggest that ethiopia s urban labor markets might be integrating

pension design with a large informal labor market evidence from chile this article investigates the fiscal and welfare trade offs involved in designing a pension system when workers can avoid contributing by working informally using a life cycle model of labor supply and saving decisions i structurally estimate preferences and earnings opportunities in the formal and informal sectors using data on chilean households i find limited support for formal jobs rationing instead mandatory pension contributions significantly encourage informality policy experiments show that chile could lower minimum pension spending by 23 while guaranteeing the same income to retirees if the minimum pension s implicit tax rate was increased to 60

wages and informality in developing countries we develop an equilibrium wage posting model with heterogeneous firms that decide to locate in the formal or the informal sector and workers who search randomly on and off the job we estimate the model on brazilian labor force survey data in equilibrium firms of equal productivity locate in different sectors a fact observed in the data wages are characterized by compensating differentials we show that tightening enforcement does not increase unemployment and increases wages total output and welfare by enabling better allocation of workers to higher productivity jobs and improving competition in the formal labor market jel e26 j24 j31 j46 o15 o17

the importance of bundling in a gorman lancaster model of earnings the idea that the labor market of individuals can be decomposed into payments to separate productive attributes has an enduring appeal in economics assuming that demographic groups differ only in their endowments of productive characteristics it is possible to rationalize observed demographic earnings differentials without invoking the arguments that characteristics specific to a particular demographic group are direct objects of employer demand by aggregating skills over all demographic groups it is possible to produce a theory of the market determination of the prices of skills held in different amounts by different demographic groups this paper considers conditions under which characteristics are uniformly priced across sectors of a multisector economy the paper presents empirical evidence that rejects uniform pricing of characteristics as a description of the us labor market bundling may account for this evudence but other hypotheses do as well authors

informal employment in developing countries opportunity or last resort there is an ongoing debate among researchers and policy makers whether informal sector employment is a result of competitive market forces or labor market segmentation more recently it has been argued that none of the two theories sufficiently explains informal employment but that the informal sector shows a heterogenous structure for some workers the informal sector is an attractive employment opportunity whereas for others rationed out of the formal sector the informal sector is a strategy of last resort to test the empirical relevance of this hypothesis we formulate an econometric model which allows for several unobserved segments within the informal sector and apply it to the urban labor market in cote d ivoire

using alsace moselle local laws to build a difference in differences estimation strategy of the employment effects of the 35 hour workweek regulation in france france s 1998 implementation of the 35 hour workweek has been one of the greatest regulatory shocks on labor markets few studies evaluate the impact of this regulation because of a lack of identification strategies for historical reasons due to the way alsace moselle was returned to france in 1918 the implementation of france s 35 hour workweek was less stringent in that region than in the rest of the country which is confirmed by double and triple differences yet it shows no significant difference in employment with the rest of france which casts doubt on the effectiveness of this regulation

segmented or competitive labour markets a normal roy model with four sectors is developed it allows to derive tests of several assumptions on the working of the labor market strongly or weakly competitive or segmented it shows that more important a feature of labor markets than segmentation is the presence of comparative advantages for individuals between the various economic sectors the model is applied to data on women s labor force participation in the main towns of colombia in 1980 it uses multivariate probit and tobit techniques copyright 1991 by the econometric society

technical note sequential multiproduct price competition in supply chain networks we analyze a general model in which at each echelon of the supply process an arbitrary number of firms compete offering one or multiple products to some or all of the firms at the next echelon with firms at the most downstream echelon selling to the end consumer at each echelon the offered products are differentiated and the firms belonging to this echelon engage in price competition the model assumes a general set of piecewise linear consumer demand functions for all products potentially brought to the consumer market where each product s demand volume may depend on the retail prices charged for all products consumers preferences over the various product retailer combinations are general and asymmetric similarly the cost rates incurred by the firms at the most upstream echelon are general as well we fully characterize the equilibrium behavior under linear price only contracts and we show how all equilibrium performance measures can be computed via a simple recursive scheme moreover we establish how changes in the model parameters in particular exogenous cost rates or intercept values in the demand functions impact the system wide equilibrium these comparative statics results allow for the quantification of cost pass through effects and the measurement and characterization of the firms brand value lastly we illustrate what qualitative impacts various changes in the structure of the supply chain network may bring forth

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

reverse bullwhip effect in pricing price variability is one of the major causes of the bullwhip effect this paper analyzes the impact of procurement price variability in the upstream of a supply chain on the downstream retail prices procurement prices may fluctuate over time for example when the supply chain players deploy auction type procurement mechanisms or if the prices are dictated in market exchanges a game theory framework is used here to model a serial supply chain sequential price game scenarios are investigated to show that there is an increase in retail price variability and an amplified reverse bullwhip effect on prices rbp under certain demand conditions

modeling informality formally households and firms i introduction recent estimates indicate that around 10 of gross domestic product gdp in the united states is produced by individuals or firms that evade taxes schneider and enste 2000 in latin america approximately 50 of all salaried employees work informally an important question is therefore what are the determinants of informality unfortunately three decades of research have not yet yielded a consensus opinion on this point the traditional explanation initiated with the work of lewis 1954 assumes the existence of segmented labor markets in which some workers do not have access to jobs in the regulated formal sector these workers are forced to accept lower paying informal sector jobs that usually involve inferior working conditions while this view has become prevalent in the development literature direct empirical tests of the premise that informal workers would expect higher wages in the formal sector yield mixed results for instance magnac 1991 maloney 2004 and pratap and quintin 2004 do not find compelling evidence of segmentation between the formal and the informal sectors using data from colombia mexico and argentina respectively it is nonetheless certainly plausible that the presence of unions might segment the labor market layard et al 1991 however even if we believe that unionization has been an important factor in determining labor market segmentation in the past the pronounced decline of unionization throughout latin america over the last two decades seems to be a less satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon at the present time especially since informality increased in most countries in latin america during the same period gasparini and tornarolli 2006 another approach emphasizes the role of labor market regulation and taxation as the main cause of informality a pioneering study by de soto 1989 describes how informal workers develop their own laws and institutions to make up for the shortcomings of the official legal system it is certainly true that the size of the shadow economy is affected by the burden of taxes and social security contributions as well as by the many other regulations governing the official economy the problem with adopting this explanation of informality unreservedly however is that it overlooks the fact that workers have nonpecuniary preferences for the sector they work for and these preferences play a role in determining the equilibrium level of formality of an economy in particular workers in the informal sector are not eligible for socially mandated benefits three stylized facts characterize informality 1 small firms tend to operate informally while large firms tend to operate formally 2 unskilled workers tend to be informal while skilled ones have formal jobs 3 ceteris paribus secondary workers a worker other than the household head are less likely to operate formally than primary workers in this paper we present a model of an economy in which the sizes and wages of the formal and informal sectors are endogenously determined that accounts for these three facts our model entails a continuum of types on both sides of the labor market i e firms and workers firms choose whether to operate formally or informally and workers choose in what sector they work in equilibrium managerial talent determines size dualism at the firm level and human capital is the factor that determines whether workers are employed in the formal or informal sector in our model both heterogeneous firms and workers have preferences over the sectors they operate and choose optimally whether to function formally or informally by contrast a prominent feature of the preexisting literature is the idea that workers decisions play no role in determining the equilibrium of the economy thus our model is the first one in which policies that affect workers preferences as well of course as firm preferences over the formal or the informal sector such as pension plans public health issues and unemployment and any social benefits will affect the sizes and wages of the formal and the informal sectors

a supply chain network economic model with time based competition abstract this paper presents an integrated model for time cost competition between supply chains with heterogeneous customers the firms in our model can offer various time options for their production service to time sensitive customers this gives rise of a new concept of time based supply chain which we call t chain to be the basic element in the competition and extends the inter supply chain competition to a new dimension of time assuming the customers are heterogeneous in time cost bi criteria decision making we integrate the discrete choice theory into supply chain network competition and formulate the equilibrium conditions as a multinomial logit based variational inequality problem numerical examples are presented for model illustration and managerial insights such as profit maximization for a firm who participates in this supply chain network

a note on the effects of downstream efficiency on upstream pricing the study of the effects of downstream entry on upstream pricing has revealed the counter intuitive result of the supplier s pricing policy being invariant to a new downstream entry under an isoelastic inverse demand function we show that this counter intuitive result is reversed when a new downstream entry affects downstream efficiency we show that in the presence of increased post entry downstream efficiency the supplier increases the wholesale price by taking advantage of the increased retail efficiency and competition we also investigate the applicability of our results under other types of inverse demand functions

aggregate production planning for process industries under oligopolistic competition abstract we consider a competitive version of the traditional aggregate production planning model with capacity constraints in the general case multiple products are produced by a few competing producers oligopoly with limited capacities production quantities prices and consequently profits depend on production and allocation decisions of each producer in addition there is competition for the raw material whose supplies are limited and where prices reflect these limitations such situations have recently occurred in several process industry settings including petro refining petrochemicals basic chemicals cement fertilizers pharmaceuticals rubber paper food processing and metals we use a successive bertrand cournot framework to address this problem and to determine optimal production quantities prices and profits at the producers and at the raw material supplier our analysis allows a new way to understand and evaluate the marginal value of additional capacity when there is competition for the market and raw materials

vertical integration with endogenous contract leadership stability and fair profit allocation abstract this paper studies vertical integration in serial supply chains with a wholesale price contract we consider a business environment where the contracting leader may be endogenously changed before and after forming the integration a cooperative game is formulated to normatively analyze the stable and fair profit allocations under the grand coalition in such an environment our main result demonstrates that vertical integration is stable when all members are pessimistic in the sense that they are sure that they will not become the contracting leader if they deviate from the grand coalition we find that in this case the grand coalition s profit must be allocated more to the retailer and the members with higher costs nevertheless we also show the conditions under which the upstream manufacturer can have strong power as in traditional supply chains

vertical integration variable proportions and successive oligopolies this paper investigates the problem of how the effect of vertical integration upon the final product price is related to the production and or market structures some ambiguous results of the previous models are shown to involve the compound effect of vertical an d horizontal merger this model considers purely vertical integration and shows that the lerner index of monopoly remains unaffected before and after merger vertical integration is shown accordingly to yield an unambiguous decrease in the final product price an increase in consumer welfare implications for antitrust laws are also discussed copyright 1988 by blackwell publishing ltd

competitive location production and market selection abstract this paper investigates how firms should select their production sites capacities and quantities under rivalry there are assumed to be a finite number of discrete potential location sites and a finite number of discrete markets which may or may not coincide firms first decide either simultaneously or sequentially whether and where to establish a production site the fixed cost of opening a facility and the marginal cost of production both depend on where the facility is located firms then choose capacity and a production quantity for each market prices in each market are determined by the total quantity available at that location via the cournot mechanism this formulation thus addresses multi market oligopolistic spatial competition with heterogeneity in production and logistics costs we then analyze the nash equilibria of the entry game and provide sufficient conditions for the existence of equilibria in the simultaneous entry game at equilibrium firms may not produce for all markets and may have limited market areas however these areas may overlap so that there are multiple suppliers in any market in general there may not be a first mover advantage and early entrants may earn lower profits than later entrants

formal but less equal gender wage gaps in formal and informal jobs in urban brazil in developing countries a large share of employees work informally and are not covered by employment protection legislation i study here how gender wage inequality differs across formal and informal jobs in brazil the raw gender wage gap is higher in informal jobs 13 compared to formal jobs 5 but i show that this difference is an artefact of different male and female selection processes first women have better observable characteristics than men and the female advantage is stronger among formal employees second men and women entering formal and informal jobs have different unobservable characteristics controlling for endogenous selection into formal vs informal jobs i find that the gender gap in wage offers is high and increases with education in formal jobs in informal jobs however estimated wage offers are the same for men and women i discuss the potential implications of these findings regarding the effect of labour market regulation on gender wage gaps

decentralized decision making and protocol design for recycled material flows reverse logistics networks often consist of several tiers with independent members competing at each tier this paper develops a methodology to examine the individual entity behavior in reverse production systems we consider two tiers in the network collectors and processors the collectors determine individual flow functions that relate the flow they provide each processor to the overall vector of prices that the processors determine because the exact final prices are unknown each collector solves a robust optimization formulation where the prices paid by the processors are assumed to be within given ranges the processors compete for the flow from the collectors until the nash equilibrium is reached in this competitive tier which sets the vector of prices to be offered to the collectors to demonstrate the approach a numerical example is given for a prototypical recycling network

introduction to the distribution of earnings and of individual output by a d roy this article summarises the lasting contribution of roy s 1950 fundamental paper roy a d 1950 the distribution of earnings and of individual output economic journal vol 60 239 pp 489 505

segmentation and mobility of women in argentine labor markets este trabajo analiza la movilidad laboral de las mujeres en la argentina en 1995 2003 en 4 sectores formal informal desempleo e inactividad incorporamos medidas alternativas de movilidad laboral y estimamos un modelo logistico multinomial para la eleccion del sector los resultados son consistentes con la hipotesis de mercados laborales segmentados mujeres con estudios superiores incluso casadas y con hijos acceden mas facilmente al sector formal que mujeres menos educadas no madres experimentan menos obstaculos para moverse del sector informal al formal tener mas hijos aumenta la probabilidad de transicion del sector formal al informal y del informal a salir del mercado de trabajo

competition and regulation in vertically related markets in an industry where naturally monopolistic and competitive activities are vertically related should the natural monopolist be allowed also to operate in the deregulated competitive sector unlike much of the literature on vertical integration this paper assumes that monopoly pricing behaviour is regulated and therefore the effect of vertical integration on the task of regulation is central to the analysis in the model there is both imperfect information and imperfect competition when vertical integration by the monopolist is allowed the regulator s task is made harder insofar as the monopolist has anticompetitive incentives to raise rivals costs on the other hand integration may lead to there being fewer firms in the deregulated sector and hence less duplication of fixed costs the overall welfare comparison between separation and integration is ambiguous as two simple examples illustrate various extensions to the analysis are also considered one of the central questions in debates on regulatory reform is how to organize industries that contain both naturally monopolistic and potentially competitive activities electricity transmission and distribution are characterized by natural monopoly cost conditions but electricity generation is not in the gas industry pipeline services may be naturally monopolistic but supply to larger customers is not in telecommunications natural monopoly is more a feature of local network operations than of long distance operations and is not present in apparatus manufacture and supply or in the provision of value added services in railways while the infrastructure of track and stations is naturally monopolistic the supply of train services might not be policy developments notably those associated with privatization in britain and deregulation in the united states have sometimes led to radical structural reform in these industries at t for decades a vertically integrated monopolist was required under the 1982 settlement of its long running antitrust case against the u s government to divest itself of its local network operations the central electricity generating board cegb in england and wales was restructured both vertically transmission grid activities were separated from generation and horizontally before privatization in 1990 1991 by contrast british telecom was privatized as a vertically integrated dominant firm bt now faces competition from mercury and others especially in the long distance market but its dominance of local network operations might affect competition there and in other areas such as apparatus supply the local network monopoly would of course have to be regulated in any event but its link via ownership to vertically related and potentially competitive activities poses additional regulatory questions many of the efforts of the regulatory body oftel notably in relation to interconnection between bt s and rivals 1 for a general account of the theory and british experience of regulatory reform in the utility industries

vertical separation and horizontal mergers the author considers a duopoly setting consisting of two manufacturer retailer pairs in which the observable contract between each manufacturer retailer pair specifies a two part tariff without intraband competition the author shows that an upstream merger is anticompetitive under very general demand and cost conditions downstream merger is analyzed using linear demand and constant marginal cost and is shown not to be anticompetitive both with and without intraband competition and for both price and output competition between retailers in the premerger regime copyright 1995 by blackwell publishing ltd

competition in multiechelon assembly supply chains in this paper we study competition in multiechelon supply chains with an assembly structure firms in the supply chain are grouped into homogenous sectors nodes that contain identical firms with identical production capabilities that all produce exactly one undifferentiated product that may itself be a kit of components each sector may use several inputs to produce its product and these inputs are supplied by different sectors the production process within any sector is taken to be pure assembly in fixed proportions the number of firms in each sector is known the demand curve for the final product is assumed to be linear as are production costs in all sectors competition is modeled via a coordinated successive cournot model in which firms choose production quantities for their downstream market so as to maximize profits given prices for all inputs and all complementary products production quantities for sectors supplying the same successor are coordinated through pricing mechanisms so that complementary products are produced in the right proportions under these assumptions equilibrium prices for any multiechelon assembly network are characterized by a system of linear equations we derive closed form expressions for equilibrium quantities and prices in any two stage system i e a system with multiple input sectors and a single assembly sector we show that any assembly structure can be converted to an equivalent larger structure in which no more than two components are assembled at any node finally large structures can be solved either by direct solution of the characteristic linear equations or through an iterative reduction compression to smaller structures

competition and structure in serial supply chains with deterministic demand supply chains often consist of several tiers with different numbers of firms competing at each tier a major determinant of the structure of supply chains is the cost structure associated with the underlying manufacturing process in this paper we examine the impact of fixed and variable costs on the structure and competitiveness of supply chains with a serial structure and price sensitive linear deterministic demand the entry stage is modeled as a simultaneous game where the players take the outcomes of the subsequent post entry cournot competition into account in making their entry decisions we derive expressions for prices and production quantities as functions of the number of entrants at each tier of a multitier chain we characterize viability and stability of supply chain structures and show using lattice arguments that there is always an equilibrium structure in pure strategies in the entry game finally we examine the effects of vertical integration in the two tier case altogether the paper provides a framework for comparing a variety of supply chain structures and for studying how they are affected by cost structures and by the number of entrants throughout the chain

on defining and measuring the informal sector evidence from brazil summary recent debate on the reasons for the informal sector has led to renewed focus on how to operationalize the measurement of informal employment this paper investigates congruence between three empirical measures of the rate of informality using brazilian household survey data for the period 1992 2004 sixty three percent of the economically active are informal according to at least one definition but only 40 are informal according to all three regression analysis is used to shed further light on differences in these measures appropriate measurement is therefore of high significance to policy analysis and design of appropriate strategies to reduce informality