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

the drivers of international migration to the uk a panel based bayesian model averaging approach a heterogeneous panel based bayesian model averaging approach is used to identify the robust economic and policy drivers of international migration to the uk from 14 different source regions over 1980 2007 around three quarters of the increase in net immigration over the last decade which is particularly pronounced for selected source regions is associated with structural change which may be attributed to uk and foreign immigration policy the remainder of the rise is largely explained by friends and family effects there are considerable uncertainties associated both with the effects of particular economic drivers of immigration and with forecasts of immigration

banking technology and the existence of a consistent output aggregate abstract this paper addresses the question of the existence of a consistent output aggregate in banking specific necessary and sufficient conditions for output aggregation are developed and tested in the context of a second order approximation to any arbitrary multi product bank cost function the analysis provides evidence that a composite aggregate measure of output fails to provide a proper representation of banking technology and therefore previous studies that used aggregate output measures may well be subject to specification errors

adaptive learning with a unit root an application to the current account abstract this paper develops a simple two country two good model of international trade and borrowing that suppresses all previous sources of current account dynamics under rational expectations international debt follows a random walk under adaptive learning however the model s unit root is eliminated and international debt is either a stationary or an explosive process depending on agents specific learning algorithm some stationary learning algorithms result in debt following an ar 1 process with an autoregressive coefficient less than 0 8 because unit roots are a common and problematic feature of many international business cycle models our results offer a new approach for generating stationarity

location and competition in retail banking abstract we investigate the impact of banking deregulation during the 1990s on consumer welfare we estimate a spatial model of consumer demand for retail bank deposits that explicitly accounts for consumer disutility from distance traveled this is important given the substantial changes in banks branch networks observed in the data our model indicates that cross price elasticities between banks whose branches are close to consumers close banks are larger than those between far banks and more than double the cross price elasticity of close banks with respect to far banks we distinguish between thrifts and other banks and find that within thrift competitive effects are stronger than within bank effects or those between thrifts and banks we use our estimates to predict the effect of changes in market structure on consumer welfare following the branching deregulation of the riegle neal act of 1994 our results indicate that the median household gained around 60 per year from the changes approximately two thirds of the gains come from within market changes in market structure the gains were greater in markets with high initial numbers of banks than elsewhere

trade credit the financial crisis and sme access to finance mounting evidence indicates that firms particularly smes suffered from a significant credit crunch during this crisis we analyze for the first time whether trade credit provided an alternative source of external finance to smes during the crisis using firm level spanish data we find that credit constrained smes depend on trade credit but not bank loans and that the intensity of this dependence increased during the financial crisis unconstrained firms in contrast are dependent on bank loans but not on trade credit

imperfect competition information heterogeneity and financial contagion this study examines how heterogeneity of private information may induce financial contagion using a model of multi asset trading in which the three main channels of contagion through financial linkages in the literature correlated information correlated liquidity and portfolio rebalancing are ruled out by construction i show that financial contagion can still be an equilibrium outcome when speculators receive heterogeneous fundamental information risk neutral speculators trade strategically across many assets to mask their information advantage about one asset asymmetric sharing of information among them prevents rational market makers from learning about their individual signals and trades with sufficient accuracy incorrect cross inference about terminal payoffs and contagion ensue when used to analyze the transmission of shocks across countries my model suggests that the process of generation and disclosure of information in emerging markets may explain their vulnerability to financial contagion jel d82 g14 g15

income and democracy evidence from nonlinear estimations we test the relation between income and democracy during the postwar period we employ panel estimation methods that explicitly allow for the fact that the primary measures of democracy are censored with substantial mass at the boundaries we find that the statistically significant positive income democracy relationship is robust to the inclusion of country fixed effects

dynamics of the cobweb model with adaptive expectations and nonlinear supply and demand the price quantity dynamics of the cobweb model with adaptive expectations and nonlinear supply and demand curves is analysed we prove that chaotic dynamical behaviour can occur even if both the supply and demand curves are monotonic the introduction of adaptive expectations into the cobweb model leads to price quantity fluctuations with a smaller amplitude however at the same time the price quantity cycles may become unstable and chaotic oscillations may arise we present a geometric explanation why chaos can occur for a large class of nonlinear monotonic supply and demand curves

the existence of input and output aggregates in aggregate production functions in this paper we make two contributions to the literature on aggregating inputs and outputs in economy production functions first we present necessary and sufficient conditions for aggregating efficiently allocated goods under general assumptions on the technology second we present a general theorem on the conditions for the existence of aggregates of both efficiently allocated goods and arbitrarily allocated goods we use this theorem to elucidate the role of efficiency in determining the existence of aggregates

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

assumptions matter model uncertainty and the deterrent effect of capital punishment the effectiveness of capital punishment in deterring homicides has remained unclear despite the fact that the supreme court s mor atorium on capital punishment and the subsequent adoption of capital punishment by a subset of states combined with very different rates of execution across polities would appear to be an ideal environment for revealing deter rence effects using panel data methods one can find papers that argue that postmoratorium data reveal large deterrent effects dezhbakhsh rubin and shepherd 2003 drs hereafter zimmerman 2004 fail to provide evidence of a deterrent effect donohue and wolfers 2005 durlauf navarro and rivers 2010 dnr hereafter or provide a mixture of positive deter rence and negative deterrence brutalization effects depending on the frequency of execution shepherd 2005

how bank capital buffers vary across countries the influence of cost of deposits market power and bank regulation abstract this paper analyzes the bank and country determinants of capital buffers using a panel data of 1337 banks in 70 countries between 1992 and 2002 after controlling for adjustment costs and the endogeneity of explanatory variables the results show that capital buffers are positively related to the cost of deposits and bank market power although the relations vary across countries depending on regulation supervision and institutions their impact is the result of two generally opposing effects restrictions on bank activities and official supervision reduce the incentives to hold capital buffers by weakening market discipline but at the same time they promote higher capital buffers by increasing market power institutional quality has the two opposite effects better accounting disclosure and less generous deposit insurance however have a clear positive effect on capital buffers by both strengthening market discipline and making charter value better able to reduce risk taking incentives

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

systemic risk and competition revisited abstract this paper revisits the mechanism behind the relation between bank competition and systemic risk i decompose this risk into a component driven by banks commonality with the market and a component arising from other sources of interbank commonality i show that competition is negatively related to the latter this relationship is stronger for more informationally opaque banks financed with a larger share of uninsured sources and in countries with lower deposit insurance coverage the findings are consistent with herding incentives at banks when competition is low

does schooling cause growth a number of economists find that growth and schooling are highly correlated across countries a model is examined in which the ability to build on the human capital of one s elders plays an important role in linking growth to schooling the model is calibrated to quantify the strength of the effect of schooling on growth by using evidence from the labor literature on mincerian returns to education the upshot is that the impact of schooling on growth explains less than one third of the empirical cross country relationship the ability of reverse causality to explain this empirical relationship is also investigated

bank competition and credit standards this article offers an explanation for the substantial variation of credit standards and price competition among banks over the business cycle as the economic outlook improves the average default probabilities of borrowers decline this affects the profitability of screening and causes bank screening intensity to display an inverse u shape as a function of economic prospects low screening activity in expansions creates intense price competition among lenders and loans are extended to lower quality borrowers as the economic outlook worsens price competition diminishes and credit standards tighten significantly deposit insurance may contribute to the countercyclical variation of credit standards copyright 2004 oxford university press

rough and lonely road to prosperity a reexamination of the sources of growth in africa using bayesian model averaging this paper takes a fresh look at africa s growth experience by using the bayesian model averaging bma methodology bma enables us to consider a large number of potential explanatory variables and sort out which of these variable can effectively explain africa s growth experience posterior coefficient estimates reveal that key engines of growth in africa are substantially different from those in the rest of the world more precisely it is shown that mining primary exports and initial primary education exerted differential effect on african growth these results are examined in relation to the existing literature copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

imperfect competition in a multi security market with risk neutrality the central purpose of this paper is to develop a model of insider trading i e trading based on private information in the context of an imperfectly competitive multi security market with risk neutral agents imperfect competition allows us to consider strategic behavior and a multi security market lets us study the effect of a correlated environment on equilibrium we employ the informational assumption that market makers can observe all order flows and so portfolio diversification arises in this model for strategic reasons given correlated fundamentals market makers can potentially learn about every security from each order flow this causes even a risk neutral trader who does not face short selling restrictions to refrain from determining the demand for each security independently this contrasts with traditional multi asset models which focus on the incentive to reduce portfolio variance or the effect of short selling restrictions or budget constraints under imperfect competition correlation has two effects one ceteris paribus it allows the uninformed to learn from additional variables since each order flow could potentially have information about all payoffs on the other hand it creates an incentive for informed traders to restrict what others can learn from public information thus our analysis can be viewed as an application to the multi security heterogeneous information model in admati 1985 of the imperfectly competitive equilibrium concept which kyle 1985 first applied to the single security homogeneous information model of grossman and stiglitz 1980 our principal results include an explicit characterization of a linear equilibrium as a function of three general covariance matrices associated with payoffs noise trading and errors in private signals under general covariance structures we show that there always exists an equilibrium in which the relationship between the vector of prices and the vector of order flows is governed by a symmetric positive definite matrix the plan of the paper is as follows in section 2 we introduce our model we derive the equilibrium in section 3 and section 4 comments on the properties of the equilibrium the proofs of the results are in the appendix

assessing bank competition for consumer loans abstract based on frontier analysis we derive inferences of bank consumer loan competition from estimating a revenue cost competition efficiency ce frontier the competitiveness of the 400 billion u s bank consumer loan market is then assessed by comparing results from our frontier ce measure with other competition measures such as hhi lerner index and h statistic these measures are weakly related to one another and only half of them identify banks with the highest loan price as also being the least competitive this is the opposite of what is expected using the frontier ce measure the most and least competitive banks are not located in the most populous states and the largest banks are underrepresented overall the hhi should not be used to indicate competition

x efficiency in banking looking beyond the balance sheet the distribution free and stochastic frontier estimation methods are used to derive bank specific measures of cost and profit xefficiency this is done to investigate the importance of including aggregate measures of off balance sheet obs activities the results indicate that economic cost and production cost x efficiency estimates increase with the inclusion of the obs measure profit xefficiency estimates are largely unaffected further the composition of bankso obs activities appears to help explain interbank differences in cost and profit x efficiency estimates whereas bank size and the mix between on and off balance sheet banking activities are largely uncorrelated with the x efficiency estimates

a study of bank efficiency taking into account risk preferences abstract i use the stochastic cost frontier approach to investigate efficiency of banks operating in the third federal reserve district accounting for the quality and riskiness of bank output in addition to the mean and mode of the conditional distribution of the one sided error term i calculate confidence intervals for the inefficiency measures based on the conditional distribution the results indicate that third district banks are operating at cost efficient output levels and product mixes but are not efficiently using their inputs the second part of the article relates the inefficiency measures to several correlates

trade creation and diversion revisited accounting for model uncertainty and natural trading partner effects summary the effect of preferential trade agreements ptas on trade flows is subject to model uncertainty stemming from the diverse and even contradictory effects suggested by the theoretical pta literature the existing empirical literature has produced remarkably disparate results and the wide variety of empirical approaches reflects the uncertainty about the correct set of explanatory variables that ought to be included in the analysis to account for the model uncertainty that surrounds the validity of the competing pta theories we introduce bayesian model averaging bma to the pta literature statistical theory shows that bma successfully incorporates model uncertainty in linear regression analysis by minimizing the mean squared error and by generating predictive distributions with optimal predictive performance once model uncertainty is addressed as part of the empirical strategy we find strong evidence of trade creation trade diversion and open bloc effects our results are robust to a range of alternative empirical specifications proposed by the recent pta literature copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

scale economies in banking a restructuring and reassessment the issue of scale economies in banking has a rich history most earlier studies report modest operating cost scale economies for small institutions those with less than about 50 million of deposits in 1968 dollars but are unclear where these economies might end if at all unfortunately these studies are limited in four important respects first those that were well specified did not measure the total cost of banking operations but concentrated on estimating scale economies for individual banking functions e g demand deposits separately from commercial loans second an average cost curve that could take a u shape over the full range of banks was not fitted either because larger banks were not included or because of the functional form used cobb douglas consequently the optimum or minimum cost size of a bank or office could not be determined third the variables measuring the costs of branching were misspecified fourth the branch

do large banks have lower costs new estimates of returns to scale for u s banks this paper presents new fully nonparametric estimates of ray scale and expansion path scale economies for u s banks based on a model of bank costs unlike prior studies that use models with restrictive parametric assumptions or limited samples our methodology uses local polynomial estimators and data on all u s banks over the period 1984 2006 our estimates indicate that as recently as 2006 most u s banks faced increasing returns to scale suggesting that scale economies are a plausible but not necessarily only reason for the growth in average bank size and that the tendency toward increasing scale is likely to continue unless checked by government intervention

the panzar rosse revenue test and market power in banking abstract the panzar rosse h statistic is a commonly used measure of market power in banking it is widely believed that h 0 is inconsistent with significant market power this study rigorously disproves that perception instead the possibility of h 0 under conditions of substantial market power turns out robust to the timing of banks actions relative costs choice of strategic variable degree of product differentiation strategy static or dynamic and degree of heterogeneity in banks conduct collusive versus fringe and hence may be common in practice

investing under model uncertainty decision based evaluation of exchange rate forecasts in the us uk and japan we evaluate the forecast performance of a range of theory based and atheoretical models explaining exchange rates in the us uk and japan a decision making environment is fully described for an investor who optimally allocates portfolio shares to domestic and foreign assets methods necessary to compute and use forecasts in this context are proposed including the means of combining density forecasts to deal with model uncertainty an out of sample forecast evaluation exercise is described using both statistical criteria and decision based criteria the theory based models are found to perform relatively well when their forecasts are judged by their economic value

global market power and diversification during the past decade several studies have tested the competitive effect of diversification on market performance following the approach of penrose i959 one type of research has focused on its impact on corporate growth the basic assumption is that a slow growing but profitable oligopoly in which internally generated funds are substantially more than those required to maintain the position in the areas of specialisation will tend to expand towards promising industry manufacturing products according to berry i97i the diversification that has led to relatively rapid rates of corporate growth has not in general been to markets where the entering firm is a new and potentially competitive force rather diversification has been to markets that are related to and potentially if not actively competitive with those in which the entering firm will frequently share whatever market power already exists p 74 jacquemin and berry i979 using data for 460 large us industrial corporations and applying an entropy measure of diversification have shown that indeed diversification into closely related industries is positively linked with the firm s rate of growth but that diversification far remote from the original base also favours such a growth

why european banks are less profitable than u s banks a decomposition approach abstract the low profitability of european banks relative to their u s counterparts has recently raised concerns among policy makers and researchers this paper attempts to shed light on this issue by using the o donnell 2012 decomposition approach this approach enables us to decompose the relative profitability of european banks into an output input price index and a total factor productivity index with the former further decomposed into two price indexes and the latter further into four productivity and efficiency measures our results show that european banks profitability was not only weak but also deteriorated over time our further analysis shows that the decline in the output input price index was due to declines in relative lending rate and relative return on securities and an increase in funding costs while the decline in the productivity index was driven by declines in technical efficiency scale efficiency and residual mix efficiency

economic information versus quality variation in cross country data data quality in the penn world tables varies systematically across countries that have different growth rates and are at different stages of economic development thus intro ducing measurement error correlated with variables of economic interest we explore this problem with three examples from the literature showing that the problem appears to be minor in growth convergence regressions but serious in estimating the effect of income volatility on growth and in a cross country lest of the permanent income hypothesis the results suggest at the least a need for performing appropriate sensitivity tests before draw

errors in the penn world table demographic data abstract versions 5 6 and 6 1 of the penn world table contain errors in the demographic data underlying some series for population real gdp per capita and real gdp per worker evidence and methods for correction are presented

market power in a securities market with endogenous information a rational expectations model of a securities market is developed in which one agent the monopolist behaves like a stackelberg leader and other agents behave competitively two information structures one in which each agent has identical information and the other in which each agent has independent information are examined equilibrium is shown to exist and is characterized in both cases but monopoly has a significant effect on the equilibrium only in the latter the optimal strategy of the stackelberg leader is also studied and it is shown that he will not randomize his strategy by adding white noise to his demand function even though this obfuscates the information content of the market price

an exploration of the eductive justifications of the rational expectations hypothesis this paper examines justifications of the rational expectations hypothesis that rely on the analysis of the agents mental forecasting educing activity which involves forecasting the forecasts of others etc the corresponding concept of eductive learning stability based on the game theoretical concept of rationalizability is primarily used within the classical muth model conditions for coordination of beliefs are interpreted and discussed they are robust to the introduction of noise more generally eductive stability fits economic intuition on coordination stability increases when the industry product differentiation increases and when decisions are sequential and observable copyright 1992 by american economic association

market power and inflation market power exercised by firms has become central to macroeconomics recent theoretical work highlights the importance of the relation between market power and inflation we examine this relation for individual firms in eleven u s industries our econometric framework exploits restrictions from dynamic theory and information from financial markets to generate quantitative evidence on the responsiveness of market power to inflation we find that inflation usually has a positive effect on market power this relation is heterogeneous across the eleven industries and statistically significant positive relations are concentrated in industries with little market power

evidence on features of a dsge business cycle model from bayesian model averaging the empirical support for features of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with two technology shocks is evaluated using bayesian model averaging over vector autoregressions the model features include equilibria restrictions on long run responses a structural break of unknown date and a range of lags and deterministic processes we find support for a number of features implied by the economic model and the evidence suggests a break in the entire model structure around 1984 after which technology shocks appear to account for all stochastic trends business cycle volatility seems more due to investment specific technology shocks than neutral technology shocks

growth econometrics for agnostics and true believers abstract the issue of model uncertainty is central to the empirical study of economic growth many recent papers use bayesian model averaging to address model uncertainty but ciccone and jarocinski 2010 have questioned the approach on theoretical and empirical grounds they argue that a standard agnostic approach is too sensitive to small changes in the dependent variable such as those associated with different vintages of the penn world table pwt this paper revisits their theoretical arguments and empirical illustration drawing on more recent vintages of the pwt and introducing an approach that limits the degree of agnosticism

enjoying the quiet life under deregulation evidence from adjusted lerner indices for u s banks abstract the quiet life hypothesis posits that firms with market power incur inefficiencies rather than reap monopolistic rents we propose a simple adjustment to lerner indices to account for the possibility of forgone rents to test this hypothesis for a large sample of u s commercial banks we find that adjusted lerner indices are significantly larger than conventional lerner indices and trending upward over time instrumental variable regressions reject the quiet life hypothesis for cost inefficiencies however lerner indices adjusted for profit inefficiencies reveal a quiet life among u s banks

imperfect competition among informed traders we analyze competition among informed traders in the continuous time kyle 1985 model as foster and viswanathan 1996 do in discrete time we explicitly describe the unique linear equilibrium when signals are imperfectly correlated and confirm the conjecture of holden and subrahmanyam 1992 that there is no linear equilibrium when signals are perfectly correlated one result is that at some date and at all dates thereafter the market would have been more informationally efficient had there been a monopolist informed trader instead of competing traders the relatively large amount of private information remaining near the end of trading causes the market to approach complete illiquidity copyright the american finance association 2000

a near rational model of the business cycle with wage and price inertia this paper presents a model in which insignificantly suboptimal behavior causes aggregate demand shocks to have significant real effects the individual loss to agents with inertial price wage behavior is second order in terms of the parameter describing the shock while the effect on real economic variables is first order thus significant changes in business activity can be generated by anticipated money supply changes provided that some agents are willing to engage in nonmaximizing behavior which results in small losses

the asymmetric effects of uncertainty on inflation and output growth we study the effects of growth volatility and inflation volatility on average rates of output growth and inflation for post war us data our results suggest that increased growth uncertainty is associated with significantly lower average growth while higher inflation uncertainty is significantly negatively correlated with lower output growth and lower average inflation both inflation and growth display evidence of significant asymmetric response to positive and negative shocks of equal magnitude copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

adaptive expectations and cobweb phenomena does heterogeneity matter this paper studies a cobweb type commodity market characterized by a strictly monotone demand and supply in which n types of firms operate types differ in a key parameter governing price expectations which are supposed to be adaptive the unique steady state of the resulting economic dynamics is characterized in terms of stability and the impact of the number of firms types is studied to this end the notions of structural and behavioural degree of instability which are introduced in the paper prove to be crucial in determining whether stability or instability prevail the case of market integration is also considered and conditions to have stability or instability in terms of the original markets parameters are given the baseline structure is extended in two directions the first extension assumes the point of view of an authority who is uncertain about the firms types in this case the structural degree of instability determines how heterogeneity affects the probability of ending up with a stable outcome the second extension consists in endogenizing the choice of predictors through a discrete choice based evolutionary mechanism in both cases the amount of the heterogeneity and its possible variations play a critical role in shaping the range of possible long run outcomes of the model

the lerner index of monopoly power origins and uses abba lerner s 1934 paper in the review of economic studies is known today as the source of the lerner index of monopoly power by identifying the social loss from monopoly as the diver gence between price and marginal cost rather than the usually accepted p 161 relationship between price and average cost lerner redirected attention from the monopolist s profits to the allocative inefficiency created by the pursuit of those profits this insight is so ingrained in the mind of economists today that it is easy to over look what a significant advance it represented in a paper commemorating lerner s sixtieth birthday paul samuelson 1964 observed that while lerner s insight may seem simple i can testify that no one at chicago or harvard could tell me in 1935 exactly why p mc was a good thing p 173 lerner s reasoning about the social loss from monopoly identified the social optimum with a pareto optimal state of affairs and in the process offered what tibor scitovsky 1984 called the first clear rigorous and definitive statement of pareto optimality p 1 551 these encomia from titans of the discipline refer to a paper written when lerner was a graduate student 1 the lerner index p mc p identified the degree of monopoly with the differ ence between the firm s price and its marginal cost at the profit maximizing rate of output for lerner a bigger wedge between p and mc meant greater monopoly power a profit maximizing firm s monopoly power varied directly and only with the firm s own price elasticity of demand lerner s benchmark for measuring monopoly

the determinants of vulnerability to the global financial crisis 2008 to 2009 credit growth and other sources of risk abstract in this paper we identify initial macroeconomic and financial market conditions that help explain the distinct response of the real economy of a particular country to the recent global financial crisis using four measures of crisis severity we examine a data set with over 90 potential explanatory factors employing techniques that are robust to model uncertainty four findings are of particular note first we find empirical evidence for the pivotal role of pre crisis credit growth in shaping the real economy s response to the crisis specifically a 1 increase in pre crisis lending translates into a 0 2 increase in the cumulative loss in real output moreover the combination of pronounced growth in lending ahead of the crisis and the country s exposure to external funding from advanced economies is shown to intensify the real downturn economies with booming real activity before the crisis are found to be less resilient to the global shock buoyant growth in real gdp in parallel with strong growth of credit particularly exacerbated the effects of the recent crisis on the real economy finally we provide empirical evidence on the importance of holding international reserves in explaining the response of the real economy to the crisis the accumulation of international reserves mitigated the harmful effects of financial stress on the real economy in particular when domestic funding via credit is abundant the results are shown to be robust to several estimation techniques including those allowing for cross country spillovers

heterogeneous beliefs and the non linear cobweb model abstract this paper generalizes the evolutionary cobweb model with heterogeneous beliefs of brock and hommes 1997 econometrica 65 1059 1095 to the case of non linear demand and supply agents choose between a simple freely available prediction strategy such as naive expectations and a sophisticated costly prediction strategy such as rational expectations and update their beliefs according to an evolutionary fitness measure such as past realized net profits it is shown that for generic non linear monotonic demand and supply curves the evolutionary dynamics exhibits rational routes to randomness that is bifurcation routes to strange attractors occur when the traders sensitivity to differences in evolutionary fitness increases

enjoying the quiet life under deregulation not quite summary most empirical studies in the banking literature assume that the alternative profit function is linearly homogeneous in input prices we show that such an assumption is theoretically unwarranted and that its use may yield misleading results we use koetter et al review of economics and statistics 2012 94 2 462 480 as a benchmark to showcase how empirical results can be sensitive to the linear homogeneity assumption contrary to koetter et al we find a positive relation between market power and profit efficiency when this assumption is dropped this relation is slightly weakened after the wave of intrastate and interstate deregulation but not enough to support the quiet life hypothesis copyright 2014 john wiley sons ltd

measuring banks market power in the presence of economies of scale a scale corrected lerner index abstract a positive lerner index indicates a welfare loss for consumers due to deviations from marginal cost pricing such a welfare loss may not always be due to market power though in particular marginal cost pricing would result in negative profit for the firm in the presence of economies of scale in such a scenario a positive lerner index could simply reflect the firm s need to earn non negative profits rather than market power we propose a novel scale corrected price cost margin for firms that produce in the economies of scale range we show that this measure is more informative about market power than the lerner index itself as an empirical illustration we analyze market power in the u s banking sector using both the corrected and uncorrected lerner index the corrected lerner index reveals significant market power for u s commercial banks during the 2000 2014 period

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

commercial lending and distance evidence from community reinvestment act data a number of large banking organizations have substantially broadened the distances at which they are willing to extend commercial loans but there is also evidence to suggest that this has occurred primarily at the high side of the distribution of lending distances in this paper we employ a new source of data to examine the relationship between lending decisions and distance between lender and borrower for that part of the distance distribution where arguably most of the competitive interactions among lenders still occur we report three basic findings 1 distance operates as a deterrent to lending even within areas traditionally defined as local markets 2 distance is more of a deterrent for small banks than for larger organizations even within these areas and 3 for those commercial loans made within areas currently treated by regulators as markets distance has not been declining in importance indeed a preponderance of the evidence suggests that it is becoming if anything more of a factor possible explanations and policy implications are discussed

assessing competition with the panzar rosse model the role of scale costs and equilibrium the panzar rosse test has been widely applied to assess competitive conduct often in specifications controlling for firm scale or using a price equation we show that neither a price equation nor a scaled revenue function yields a valid measure for competitive conduct moreover even an unscaled revenue function generally requires additional information about costs and market equilibrium to infer the degree of competition our theoretical findings are confirmed by an empirical analysis of competition in banking using a sample containing more than 100 000 bank year observations on more than 17 000 banks in 63 countries during the years 1994 2004

the impact of data revisions on the robustness of growth determinants a note on determinants of economic growth will data tell summary ciccone and jarocinski american economic journal macroeconomics 2010 2 222 246 show that inference in bayesian model averaging bma can be highly sensitive to small data perturbations in particular they demonstrate that the importance attributed to potential growth determinants varies tremendously over different revisions of international income data they conclude that agnostic priors appear too sensitive for this strand of growth empirics in response we show that the found instability owes much to a specific bma set up first comparing the same countries over data revisions improves robustness second much of the remaining variation can be reduced by applying an evenly agnostic but flexible prior copyright 2012 john wiley sons ltd

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

competition and credit procyclicality in european banking abstract this paper empirically assesses how competition in the banking sector affects credit procyclicality by estimating both an interacted panel var model using macroeconomic data and a single equation model with bank level data these two empirical approaches show that a deviation of actual gdp from potential gdp leads to greater credit fluctuations in economies where bank competition is weak this suggests that increased market power for banks increases the financial accelerator mechanism which is consistent with recent macroeconomic models showing that monopolistic banking tends to increase macroeconomic volatility by making credit cheaper during booms and more expensive during recessions

the effect of measurement error on the estimated shape of the world distribution of income abstract this note examines the robustness that two modes exist in the world s density of per capita income our results suggest that this bimodal feature is robust and are arrived at using recently developed nonparametric deconvolution techniques

how to measure the market power of banks in the lending business accurately a segment based adjustment of the lerner index numerous empirical studies use the price cost margin based lerner index li to assess the general market power of banks a common procedure within those li applications is to approximate the market price required for the li measurement as the ratio of a bank s total revenues to total assets we discuss the major flaws of this aggregated procedure and propose an adjusted i e business segment orientated li approach which is then applied to assess the market power of banks in the specific lending business at the country level our empirical study is based on an original data set containing all interest related categories weighted by the respective loan as well as deposit volumes in the countries of the european monetary union zone emu from 2003 to 2013 our results reveal that the country specific market power of banks in the lending business has been substantially underestimated in previous studies based on aggregated outputs for example averaged across the five most important economies in the em

social learning and monetary policy rules we analyse the effects of social learning in a monetary policy context social learning might be viewed as more descriptive of actual learning behaviour in complex market economies in our model taylor principle governs uniqueness and expectational stability of rational expectations equilibrium ree under homogeneous recursive algorithms we find that the taylor principle is not necessary for convergence to ree minimum state variable msv equilibrium under social learning sunspot equilibria exist in the indeterminate region our agents cannot co ordinate on a sunspot equilibrium in general form specification however they can co ordinate on common factor specification we contribute to the use of genetic algorithm learning in stochastic environments

on the evolution of the world income distribution the post world war ii period has seen substantial changes in the distribution of gdp per worker around the world in the upper half of the distribution a number of countries have exhibited large increases in income relative to the richest countries in the bottom half several countries have seen incomes fall relative to the richest countries the net result of these changes is a movement in the shape of the world income distribution from something that looks like a normal distribution in 1960 to a bi modal twin peaks distribution in 1988 projecting these changes into the future suggests a number of interesting ndings first it seems likely that the united states will lose its position as the country with the highest level of gdp per worker second growth miracles have been more common in recent decades than growth disasters if these dynamics continue the future income distribution will involve far more rich countries and far fewer poor countries than currently observed

bank competition and financial stability in asia pacific the impact of bank competition on financial stability has been a focus of academic and policy debate over the last two decades and particularly since the 2007 08 global financial crises beck 2008 oecd 2011 under the traditional competition fragility view banks cannot earn monopoly rents in competitive markets and this results in lower profits capital ratios and charter values this makes banks less able to withstand demand or supply side shocks and encourages excessive risk taking marcus 1984 alternatively the competition stability view suggests that competition leads to greater stability a less competitive banking market may lead to more risk taking if the big banks are deemed too important to fail and as such obtain implicit or explicit subsidies via government safety nets mishkin 1999 in addition banks with more market power tend to charge higher loan rates which may induce borrowers to assume greater risk leading to greater default in competitive banking markets loan rates are lower too big to fail issues and safety net subsidies are smaller and this results in a positive link between bank competition and stability boyd and de nicolo 2005 it could also be the case as noted by martinez miera and repullo 2010 that bank competition and stability are linked in a non linear manner and in a similar vein berger et al 2009 argue that competition and concentration may coexist and can simultaneously induce stability or fragility

does the version of the penn world tables matter an analysis of the relationship between growth and volatility the penn world tables pwt are an important data source for cross country comparisons in economics the pwt have undergone several revisions over time this paper documents how countries output growth rates change across four publicly available versions of the pwt we show that for some countries the magnitude of the differences is significant and or the sign of the growth rates changes across versions using as an example ramey and ramey 1995 who found growth volatility has a significant negative effect on growth we demonstrate that conclusions based on one version of the pwt may not hold under another version les tableaux mondiaux de penn penn world tables ou pwt sont une source importante de donnees comparatives entre pays dans le monde economique les pwt ont subi plusieurs revisions dans le temps ce memoire montre d abord comment les taux de croissance du produit des pays changent selon les quatre versions des pwt disponibles au public on montre que pour certains pays la taille des differences est significative et que meme le signe de ces taux change d une version a l autre utilisant comme exemple ramey et ramey 1995 qui ont montre que la volatilite de la croissance a un effet negatif sur la croissance les auteurs montrent que les conclusions fondees sur une version des pwt peuvent ne pas etre fondees dans une autre version

adaptive expectations coordination in an economy with heterogeneous agents abstract in this paper we study the problem of expectations coordination on the stationary state in a one dimensional economy with heterogeneous agents we consider a constant gain adaptive learning rule we allow for heterogeneity of the fundamentals and of the constant gain parameters we show that these two sources of heterogeneity may create difficulties to the process of coordination

long lived private information and imperfect competition we develop a multi period auction model in which multiple privately informed agents strategically exploit their long lived information we show that such traders compete aggressively and cause most of their common private information to be revealed very rapidly in the limit as the interval between auctions approaches zero market depth becomes infinite and all private information is revealed immediately these results are in contrast to those of kyle 1985 in which the monopolistic informed trader causes his information to be incorporated into prices gradually and when the interval between auctions is vanishingly small market depth is constant over time fama 1970 defines a strong form efficient market as one in which security prices fully reflect all available information including both publicly and privately held information in a pioneering and influential article kyle 1985 develops a model in which a single privately informed trader with long lived information optimally exploits his monopoly power over time kyle s 1985 main results are i the informed trader trades in a gradual manner so that his information is incorporated into prices at a slow almost linear rate and ii when auctions are held continuously the depth of the market is constant over time however kyle s 1985 assumption of a single informed trader is strong in the sense that in actual financial markets it is reasonable to expect that at least a few players will have access to private information and will trade in the knowledge that they will face competition with other informed agents in the market 1 we develop a multi period auction model in which multiple strategic informed traders optimally exploit their long lived informational advantage we thus explore the restrictiveness of kyle s assumption of a single informed trader and also examine

macroeconomic stability and the distribution of growth rates it is often argued that macroeconomic instability can form a binding constraint on economic growth drawing on a new index of stability threshold estimation is used to divide developing economies into two growth regimes depending on a threshold level of stability for the more stable group of countries the output benefits of investment are greater conditional convergence is faster and measures of institutional quality have more explanatory power suggesting that instability forms a binding constraint for the less stable group macroeconomic stability is also shown to dominate several other candidates for identifying distinct growth regimes

non structural measures of competition toward a synthesis of alternatives abstract procedures for detecting or measuring market power have been suggested in recent years by iwata rosse and panzar and bresnahan this paper integrates elements from all three approaches to provide a single more unified alternative to the structure conduct performance paradigm

the simple analytics of competitive equilibrium with multiproduct firms the familiar model of free entry competitive equilibrium has long played a central role in applied analysis of product markets among its stylizations is the restriction that firms produce a single output for many situations however it is necessary to relax this assumption while models permitting multiproduct firms exist so far there is no framework that begins to rival the singleproduct analysis in terms of the ease with which it may be manipulated and extended to deal with specific applications this paper develops such a model specifically in section i a two good model is set out that parallels the classic singleproduct analysis very closely the sole difference is that alongside the single product specialized technologies which would usually be permitted a multiproduct diversified technology is available the model s competitive equilibrium is then characterized and it is shown that this equilibrium may take one of three forms obviously if diversification offers large cost advantages no specialized firms can operate in equilibrium and conversely if there are sizable disadvantages the only other possibility is that diversified firms and exactly one type of specialized firm operate contiguously section ii shows that the model is easy to manipulate extends straightforwardly and simple as it is offers some new propositions this demonstration involves examining the predictions the model offers in both its most general form and several extensions to illustrate basic features of equilibrium in the standard single product environment are that price is determined by the cost of production with all operating firms producing the same level of output also demand variation has no effect on either price or the actions of these firms in contrast in any equilibrium centre for decision sciences and econometrics social science centre university of western ontario london ontario n6a 5c2 comments from david donaldson ignatius horstmann boyan jovanovic peter lloyd michael parkin charles plott edward prescott sherwin rosen christopher robinson hugo sonnenschein and the referees are gratefully acknowledged research allowing multiproduct firms comes in a variety of forms early work by roy g d allen 1938 john hicks 1939 paul samuelson 1947 as well as more recent efforts by keith laitinen 1980 analyzed in detail the isolated behavior of firms having access to an m input n output production technology also the arrow debreu mckenzie general equilibrium model allows each producer a distinct production set so that firms might choose to produce many goods more recently the contestability literature surveyed by elizabeth bailey and ann friedlander 1982 analyzes a setting in which firms produce more than one good of all the contestability material the work of william baumol et al 1982 ch 9 is the most closely related to the present analysis therein firms are permitted to choose a set of goods to produce and a condition is provided that is necessary and sufficient for the otherwise exogenously imposed symmetric outcome to be supported in equilibrium that this condition is indeed a relevant restriction is shown by means of a two good numerical example in which the condition fails and the equilibrium is asymmetric finally there is what might be termed the where there is sawdust there may be pressed logs approach dating back at least to alfred marshall 1920 pp 321 22 in which joint products are the result of unstructured technological complementarities

assessing competition in the banking industry a multi product approach abstract this paper investigates the competitive aspects of multi product banking operations extending panzar and rosse s 1987 model to the case of a multi product banking firm we show that higher economies of scope in multi product banking are associated with lower panzar rosse measures of competition in the banking sector to test this empirical implication and determine the impact of multi production on market power we use a new dataset on the brazilian banking industry consistent with our theoretical prediction we find that banks that offer classic banking products i e loans and credit cards and other banking products i e brokerage services insurance and capitalization bonds have substantially higher market power than banks that offer only classic products these results suggest a positive bias in the traditional estimates of competition in which multi output actions are not considered

adaptive learning and roads to chaos the case of the cobweb abstract we investigate the dynamics of the cobweb model with adaptive expectations a linear demand curve and a nonlinear s shaped increasing supply curve both stable periodic and chaotic price behaviour can occur we investigate how the dynamics of the model depend on the parameters both infinitely many period doubling and period halving bifurcations can occur when the demand curve is shifted upwards the same result holds with respect to the expectations weight factor

jointness of growth determinants this paper introduces a new measure of dependence or jointness among explanatory variables jointness is based on the joint posterior distribution of variables over the model space thereby taking model uncertainty into account by looking beyond marginal measures of variable importance jointness reveals generally unknown forms of dependence positive jointness implies that regressors are complements representing distinct but mutually reinforcing effects negative jointness implies that explanatory variables are substitutes and capture similar underlying effects in a cross country dataset we show that jointness among 67 determinants of growth is important affecting inference and informing economic policy copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

testing for convergence clubs in income per capita a predictive density approach the article proposes a technique based on the predictive density of the data conditional on the parameters of the model to jointly tests for groups of unknown size in a panel and to estimate the parameters of each group the procedure is applied to the problem of identifying convergence clubs in scaled income per capita data the steady state distribution of european regional data clusters around four poles of attraction with different economic features the distribution of income per capita of oecd countries has two poles of attraction and each group clearly identifiable economic characteristics we share the uncommonness of being different j p roche

the productivity slowdown is a growing unmeasurable sector the culprit the productivity slowdown of the early 1970s continues to puzzle economists a frequent explanation of this puzzle is that mismeasurement of output has worsened enough to help account for the apparent shortfall of output growth griliches 1994 highlighted one channel through which this worsening measurement could occur he raised the possibility that because output growth in the service sector likely is undermeasured the rising share of services has led to greater undermeasurement of overall economic growth this paper demonstrates that this argument is of little quantitative significance even under assumptions most favorable to the hypothesis the rising share of services has had only a small impact on measurement error these results along with evidence from baily and gordon 1988 make mismeasurement of output an improbable explanation for the productivity slowdown in aggregate data

distribution and mobility of wealth of nations we estimate the empirical bimodal cross section distribution of real gross domestic product per capita of 120 countries over the period 1960 1989 by a mixture of a weibull and a truncated normal density the components of the mixture represent a group of poor and a group of rich countries while the mixing proportion describes the distribution over poor and rich this enables us to analyse the development of the mean and variance of both groups separately and the switches of countries between the two groups over time empirical evidence indicates that the means of the two groups are diverging in terms of levels but that the growth rates of the means of the two groups over the period 1960 1989 are the same

eductive expectations coordination on deterministic cycles in an economy with heterogeneous agents abstract in this paper we study expectations coordination on a deterministic 2 cycle by an eductive approach in which agents are concerned with forecasting the forecasts of others this approach is grounded in some common knowledge assumptions we consider an overlapping generations economy in which agents have heterogeneous utility functions we show that locally eductively stable 2 cycles can exist when agents have stationary beliefs we also show that heterogeneity may hinder eductive coordination

on the consistency of backward looking expectations the case of the cobweb in dynamic models of economic fluctuations backward looking expectations with systematic forecasting errors are inconsistent with rational behaviour in non linear dynamic models exhibiting seemingly unpredictable chaotic fluctuations however simple habitual rule of thumb backward looking expectation rules may yield non zero but nevertheless non systematic forecasting errors in a chaotic model expectational forecasting errors may have zero autocorrelations at all lags even for rational agents patterns in these forecasting errors may be very difficult to detect especially in the presence of small noise backward looking expectations are then not necessarily inconsistent with rational behaviour we investigate whether simple expectation schemes such as naive or adaptive expectations can be consistent with rational behaviour in the simplest of all non linear dynamic economic models the non linear cobweb model

optimal departures from marginal cost pricing focuses on departures from marginal cost pricing optimal allocation or resources level of tax revenue that will be collected by the government theorems developed for resource allocation ebsco

informed speculation with imperfect competition competitive rational expectations models have the unsatisfactory property dubbed the schizophrenia problem by hellwig that each trader takes the equilibrium price as given despite the fact that he influences that price an examination of information aggregation in a non competitive rational expectations model using a nash equilibrium in demand functions shows that the schizophrenia problem is avoided by having each trader take into account the effect his demand has on the equilibrium price given a distribution of private information across traders prices reveal less information than in the competition equilibrium and prices no longer become fully informative in the limit as noise trading vanishes or as traders become risk neutral with small traders the model may become one of monopolistic competition not perfect competition in contrast to the competitive model a reasonable model of endogenous acquisition of costly private information is obtained even when traders are risk neutral

efficiency technical change and returns to scale in large us banks panel data evidence from an output distance function satisfying theoretical regularity abstract this paper provides parametric estimates of technical change efficiency change economies of scale and total factor productivity growth for large banks those with assets in excess of 1 billion in the united states over the period from 2000 to 2005 this is done by estimating an output distance function subject to theoretical regularity within a bayesian framework we find that failure to incorporate theoretical regularity conditions results in mismeasured shadow revenue and or cost shares which in turn leads to perverse conclusions regarding productivity growth our results from the regularity constrained model show that total factor productivity of the large us banks grew at an average rate of 1 98 over the sample period however our estimates also show a clear downward trend in the growth rate of total factor productivity and our decomposition of the primal divisia total factor productivity growth index into its three components technical change efficiency change and economies of scale indicates that technical change is the driving force behind this decline

cross country evidence on the link between volatility and growth this paper presents empirical evidence against the standard dichotomy in macroeconomics that separates growth from the volatility of economic fluctuations in a sample of ninety two countries as well as a sample of oecd countries the authors find that countries with higher volatility have lower growth the addition of standard control variables strengthens the negative relationship the authors also find that government spending induced volatility is negatively associated with growth even after controlling for both time and country fixed effects copyright 1995 by american economic association