on the role of demand and strategic uncertainty in capacity investment and disinvestment dynamics abstract even mature industries seldom settle down into a long run steady state fluctuations in demand disrupt the status quo and call for firms to adjust their capacities on an ongoing basis we construct a fully dynamic model of an oligopolistic industry with lumpy capacity and lumpy investment disinvestment decisions in addition to uncertainty about the evolution of demand a firm faces strategic uncertainty concerning the decisions of its rivals we numerically solve the model for its markov perfect equilibria for one set of parameter values three equilibria exist and while all of them have simple intuitive structures they exhibit widely varying patterns of response to demand shocks at one extreme one firm dominates the industry almost as a monopolist and changes its capacity to accommodate demand at the other extreme the larger firm keeps its capacity nearly constant while the smaller firm acts as the swing producer

product market competition and the industry price cost markup fluctuations abstract we examine the role played by imperfect competition in the response of markups to energy price and monetary changes we find i for concentrated industries markups increase with monetary expansion and decrease when energy prices increase the elasticity with respect to energy prices is greater than monetary changes ii for low concentration industries markups are virtually unaffected by monetary changes and the energy price elasticities are statistically insignificant iii markups are procyclical over the industry specific cycle and iv increased import competition lowers markups only in the concentrated industries the energy price increases decreases during the 1970s 1980s may have been a key factor contributing to the narrowing widening of the markup gap between high and low concentration industries we provide evidence that procyclical markups in concentrated industries are not being driven by differences in the degree of labor hoarding between low and high concentration industries

horizontal mergers in declining industries theory and evidence abstract in a declining industry horizontal merger may allow firms to retire older capacity and to match state of the art capacity at high levels of market demand mergers may be privately profitable but socially undesirable and should be prohibited here rationalization of capacity to achieve matching economies is not a sufficient argument to support merger since at high demand levels efficiency is gained only at the expense of output suppression on the other hand once industry demand has declined to low levels relative to per firm capacity privately profitable mergers are socially desirable examples of horizontal mergers in declining industries illustrate the general implications of the model

cost differences and survival in declining industries a case for picking winners abstract in this paper we examine the relationship between firms cost structures and the order of exit from declining industries we distinguish between two fundamental causes of demand decline namely a shrinkage of the consumer base and a decrease in consumers willingness to pay we show that it is not necessarily best to be small and flexible the order of exit in a market driven outcome depends on the manner in which demand shrinks we find that from a welfare perspective the order of exit determined by market forces is not necessarily desirable however simple rules for picking winners based on current unit cost profitability or productive efficiency do not provide sound guidance for policy

entry deterrence in a finitely lived industry the ghemawat and nalebuff 1985 exit model is extended to include an entry stage demand is high at the time of entry but is expected to eventually decline it is shown that equilibrium entry decisions may be critically affected by the prospect of a future decline in demand even when the latter is scheduled to occur in the arbitrarily distant future or is expected to be of arbitrarily short duration in all cases a unique perfect equilibrium for the entry game exists this equilibrium exhibits counterintuitive features for example the incumbent s and sometimes even the industry s output may be larger if the incumbent is a monopoly than if faced with a potential entrant

learning and capacity expansion under demand uncertainty a competitive dynamic model of entry into a new industry is set up and both its positive and normative aspects are studied the main assumptions are that entry is sequential that it occurs under imperfect information on the size of the market and that better information becomes available as time goes on the gradual improvement in information is due to the fact that later waves of entrants are able to observe the profitability of earlier entrants the major results reported here under suitable restrictions are that the equilibrium rate of entry is monotonically decreasing over time and that at any given point in time it is smaller than the socially optimal one when a new market opens as a result of a product being newly invented for instance or when an existing market starts to expand uncertainty with respect to its size is likely to prevail as a result of this uncertainty entry of firms into such markets typically will occur in waves some firms will enter initially while others will wait to see the consequences of that initial entry if the experience of early entrants is favourable entry will continue otherwise entry will cease hence with the introduction of a new product two phases are associated the growth phase typified by positive operating profits for existing firms and expansion of productive capacity due to entry of new firms and the mature phase typified by erosion of profits and fixed total productive capacity empiricists estimating the time pattern of investments during the growth phase have found an s shaped diffusion curve see mansfield 1986 and gort and klepper 1982 the purpose of the present paper is to theoretically characterize these time patterns and to investigate their welfare properties any attempt to model the type of entry described above must account for differences in both entry dates and resultant earnings in other words the theory must explain why the realized earnings of different cohorts of firms are not equal often such ex post differences are reconciled by assuming heterogeneity with respect to some latent underlying characteristic managerial ability for instance and attributing differences in earnings to differences in that characteristic in this paper instead earning differentials are attributable to luck only ex ante all firms are technologically identical and equally capable of forecasting market prospects and rationally acting upon those forecasts ex post some firms turn out to have entered at the right time and are for that reason more profitable the model developed in this paper analyzes a parametric example of a sequential entry problem in which the uncertainty over market size is gradually resolved over time in a bayesian setting in an environment of perfect competition and constant returns toscale a free entry equilibrium concept is introduced and the aggregate implications of the time path of investments are derived i then compare this actual time path to the optimum this comparison is interesting because the equilibrium is analysed under the

strategic investment under uncertainty a synthesis abstract investment is a central theme in economics finance and operational research traditionally the focus of analysis has been either on assessing the value of flexibility investment under uncertainty or on describing commitment effects in competitive settings industrial organization research contributions addressing the intersection of investment under uncertainty and industrial organization have become numerous in recent years in this paper we provide an overview aimed at categorizing and relating these research streams we highlight managerial insights concerning the nature of competitive advantage first versus second mover advantage the manner in which information is revealed firm heterogeneity capital increment size and the number of competing firms

the impact of mergers and acquisitions on company employment in the united kingdom abstract this paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the effects of take over and merger activity on firm employment in the united kingdom using a specially constructed database for the period 1967 1996 our results indicate that significant rationalisations in the use of labour occur as firms reduce joint output and increase efficiency post merger these effects are particularly pronounced in the case of related and especially hostile mergers

the role of acquisitions in reshaping business capabilities in the international telecommunications industry this paper focuses on the relationships between observed processes of post acquisit ion activities within four cross border horizontal acquisitions that occurred in the telecommunications equipment manufacturing sector between 1988 and 1992 we discuss the desirability of such acquisitions from a corporate and social welfare standpoint we report a detailed survey of the context post acquisition activities and outcomes of the four acquisitions the acquisition context includes industry characteristics target characteristics target strengths and acquisition motives post acquisition activities include several dimensions of business restructuring resource redeployment and creation of integration mechanisms acquisition outcomes include impact on business capabilities financial performance and judgments of overall success we conclude that the results provide stronger support for strategic reconfiguration and productive efficiency explanations for horizontal acquisitions than they do for market power target mismanagement or resource appropriation explanations

a note on the relation between size ownership status and plant s closure sunk costs vs strategic size liability abstract in this paper we test both sunk cost and strategic size liability predictions by looking at the exit behavior of a sample of italian manufacturing plants for this purpose we focus on plants size and ownership status in particular we distinguish independent plants from plants that belong to multi unit organizations as to these latter we further distinguish state owned from privately owned plants we also consider the impact upon the likelihood of closure of the size and nationality of the parent firm in addition and contrary to previous empirical work data allow us to control for differences in the cost structure of plants namely we use technology adoption dummies to take into account plants technological heterogeneity

bridging behavioral and economic theories of decline organizational inertia strategic competition and chronic failure this paper is another plea for bridging behavioral and economic approaches to the study of competition in markets and strategy making by firms the arguments focus on a specific case in point the behavioral theory of organizational decline and the economic modeling of immediate exit the arguments come in three steps first the literature on organizational decline is reviewed by organizing a framework that summarizes arguments from varying economic and organizational perspectives that have for the most part developed independently observations from empirical and theoretical studies are combined in order to investigate the causes conditions courses and consequences of organizational downturn second a theoretical argument is developed that explains voluntary exit and chronic failure by introducing a proxy of organizational inertia in a model of strategic cournot duopoly the key assumptions which have a behavioral flavour that seemingly contradicts orthodox economics are grounded in the theoretical and empirical literatures the results of the model support the claim that pure profit maximizing behavior may be at the expense of organizational survival d aveni 1990 p 135 third by formulating two hypotheses and presenting tentative evidence from the chemical industry the paper hopes to convincingly argue that such integrative models lead to empirical testing of interesting hypotheses a key finding here is that inefficient firms may outlast their efficient rivals cf d aveni 1989a

strategic information manipulation in duopolies abstract this paper studies a duopoly market in which firms can draw inferences concerning uncertain market demand from observations of their outputs and market price firms may adjust their outputs away from myopically optimal levels to affect the informativeness of the market price because firms quantities are observed firms can manipulate the extent to which belief revision occurs rather than the direction in which beliefs are revised as in signal jamming models we develop conditions and present examples under which the value of information is positive and negative and under which firms will increase or decrease quantity to manipulate information journal of economic literature classification numbers d80 l13

exit with multiplant firms using an extension of ghemawat and nalebuff s 1985 model i analyze the outcome of industry decline when firms have multiplant operations the analysis reveals that no natural generalization of their strong empirical prediction that the larger of two single plant duopolists exits first holds in a multiplant setting the results also highlight a number of factors that affect the pattern of capacity removal during industry decline and lead to a discussion of the strategic implications of firms plant size choices in general the factors determining the pattern of capacity reduction can be quite complex and prediction in such settings often requires intimate knowledge of industry structure

organizational costs sticky equilibria and critical levels of concentration jn the thirty years since joe bain s seminal i study 1951 many economists have attempted to determine whether or not there exists a critical level of market concentration at which a discontinuity occurs in the relation between industry concentration and profitability in this paper we develop and test a more general model based on organizational costs which posits the existence of two critical levels of market concentration one at which an existing cooperative equilibrium will break down as concentration declines and one at which a cooperative equilibrium will become attainable as concentration increases we show that the standard model of the critical level of concentration can be regarded as a special case of our more general model and also that the more general model attains a statistically superior fit in section ii we briefly review some of the previous literature in this area we develop our model in section iii and specify and estimate it in sections iv and v in sections vi and vii we summarize and interpret our results and present some policy implications of our findings

irreversible investment and knightian uncertainty when firms make a decision about irreversible investment they may not have complete confidence about their perceived probability measure describing future uncertainty they may think other probability measures perturbed from the original one are also possible such uncertainty characterized by not a single probability measure but a set of probability measures is called knightian uncertainty the effect of knightian uncertainty on the value of irreversible investment opportunity is shown to be drastically different from that of traditional uncertainty in the form of risk specifically an increase in knightian uncertainty decreases the value of investment opportunity while an increase in risk increases it

antitrust and merger policy a review and critique a ny antitrust policy that tries to put some restrictions on mergers must have a conceptual basis one such framework might be a populist approach in which only absolute or relative size of the merger partners and or the resulting entity would be the criterion political rhetoric often embodies this approach an alternative approach the one that underlies the 1982 department of justice merger guidelines concerns itself with the possible exercise of market power 1 i believe this second approach is more consistent with the language of section 7 of the clayton act itself which instructs the department of justice and the federal trade commission to prevent those mergers the effects of which may be substantially to lessen competition or to tend to create a monopoly this market power approach also places merger policy in a realm that is susceptible to economic analysis for this reason as well this approach appeals to me the merger guidelines are firmly rooted in the standard oligopoly theory developed by chamberlin 1933 fellner 1949 and stigler 1964 and strengthened

growth under uncertainty with experimentation abstract we introduce bayesian learning into a stochastic growth model and study the effect of experimentation on the optimal level of the investment decision and on the amount of information gathering when more investment produces more information experimentation can push towards a lower level of investment thus reducing information acquisition symmetrically when more investment reduces information experimentation can increase investment and again decrease information gathering these results run contrary to intuitions generated by the standard literature on experimentation

concentration price and critical concentration ratios a potentially important parameter that has not yet been convincingly estimated is the critical concentration ratio this paper attempts to estimate it in three types of market the estimation of a critical concentration ratio if one exists seems of potentially great importance because of its implication for antitrust policy if a critical concentration ratio were found and if concentration had no effect below that level it would seem to follow that a horizontal merger in a market where concentration was below the critical level and where the merger could not increase concentration to the critical level could not substantially lessen competition or tend to create monopoly

on industry life cycles delay entry and shakeout in beer brewing abstract this paper proposes a new explanation for industry shakeout an event evident in the life cycle of many industries in which the number of firms drops significantly in a short interval of time based on an in depth analysis of the shakeout in the united states beer brewing industry between 1880 and 1890 we propose that industry shakeouts naturally follow periods of mass entry by firms similar patterns are evident in two other industries we briefly examine the us automobile and tire industries while entry rates fluctuate broadly in all these industries we find that the timing of exit for a given cohort of entrants is remarkably similar over time the exit hazard rate is peaked in the first two years of every cohort s life and drops dramatically to low and stable levels for subsequent ages in this sense mass exit follows mass entry and does not require a deep explanation it is the mass entry evident in the data for these industries that requires an explanation we propose a theoretical model of information accumulation to explain entry into an industry entrepreneurs are uncertain about the profitability of the industry and this uncertainty is resolved through sufficient accumulation of information regarding the fortunes of incumbent firms delay in entry occurs solely due to the fact that it takes time to accumulate sufficient information to support more entry the resulting entry pattern from simulations of the model looks much like that observed in the industries we study

the arbitrage principle in financial economics abstract the importance of arbitrage conditions in financial economics has been recognized since modigliani and miller s classic work on the financial structure of the firm they showed that if a f

survival duration of plants evidence from the us petroleum refining industry abstract this paper presents a duration analysis on the survival of us petroleum refining plants for the 1981 1986 period when the industry as a whole declines in response to the decontrol of crude oil markets the purpose is to examine the duration dependence and determinants of post deregulation plant lifetimes the weibull model with the correction for unobserved individual heterogeneity provides a better fit to the data empirical results show that plant size age regulatory subsidies technology use and multiplant coordination are key determinants of refinery life duration after deregulation in addition major integrated oil companies tend to make timely restructuring via refinery closures and sales the interactive effects of size and technology use and of multiplant coordination and integrated organization are also important to the refinery survival

the value of information in efficient risk sharing arrangements suppose that agents share risks in competitive markets we show that better information makes everyone worse off if the economy has a representative agent that is the economy s demand for state contingent consumption equals the demand of a hypothetical agent who owns all the economy s wealth the representative agent moreover is normatively unrepresentative although each agent dislikes information the representative agent is indifferent although we emphasize pure exchange our results imply that a representative agent model might seriously misstate the welfare effects of improved information in an economy with production and risk sharing even if it performs well otherwise

market definition in antitrust analysis a regression based approach alleged violations of either sherman 2 s antimonopoly strictures or clayton 7 s proscriptions against anticompetitive mergers necessarily involve a particular product and must occur in a particular place that is the plaintiff in either a 2 or 7 suit must define a relevant market within which the violation alleged has occurred even in the most mundane antitrust analysis however market definition is rarely readily accomplished and unaccompanied by a series of caveats and the possibility of the opposing parties in an antitrust suit failing to contest each other s proffered definition is virtually nil 2 because economists from

bayesian economist bayesian agents i an alternative approach to optimal learning we generalize the results on bayesian learning based on the martingale convergence theorem to the sequential framework we show that the variability in the sequential framework is sufficient under mild conditions to circumvent the incomplete learning results that characterize the optimal learning literature we then give an alternative approach whereby the economist is bayesian with a prior on the space of agent priors we illustrate the usefulness of our approach by applying it to two popular economic examples a monopolist who does not know the demand curve he faces and the stochastic single sector growth model with an unknown production function

technology use and plant closure abstract this paper aims to contribute to the empirical literature on industrial demography it analyzes a stratified sample of the italian metalworking industry composed of 810 plants with more than 10 employees it considers plant closure over the period 1989 1997 probit type econometric models are estimated in order to provide evidence on the explanatory factors of the likelihood of closure with special attention being devoted to technological variables the paper extends previous empirical results along a number of directions first in spite of the fact that use of advanced technologies especially in the design and engineering sphere favors survival remarkable differences do emerge between different individual technologies ceteris paribus plants having adopted technologies characterized by sizable product specific investments turn out to be less likely to be shut down in addition the ownership status of plants is found to influence the probability of closure likelihood of survival is lower for plants that belong to multi unit organizations than for those owned by single plant firms even though the difference between the two plant categories decreases with plant size altogether such results point to the relevance of irreversibility and sunk costs for understanding exit behavior

sectoral shocks learning and aggregate fluctuations we present a model in which sectoral shocks have aggregate consequences the model relies on irreversible investment and imperfect information to slow the adjustment of expanding industries we show that this gradual expansion is sub optimal

a theory of exit in duopoly we develop a duopoly model in which exit occurs because of the existence of fixed costs or opportunity costs each firm enters the market knowing its own cost but not that of its opponent as times goes on each firm becomes increasingly pessimistic about the cost of its remaining rival the time of exit is the only strategic variable so that our model is a war of attrition in contrast to the classic war of attrition however we assume that with positive probability each firm s costs may be low enough that staying in forever is a dominant strategy thus our model unlike the classic one has a unique equilibrium

modern telecommunications infrastructure and economic activity an empirical investigation this study focuses on the impact of telecommunication infrastructure on economic activity in two sectors flare insurance and real estate and manufacturing results indicate that modernization of the telephone network is associated with more fire insurance and real estate activity in the local region while it is not associated with more manufacturing once other determinants of growth are controlled for a doubling of optic fiber cable leads to at least a 10 and possibly a much higher increase in the level of economic activity in fire insurance and real estate this result implies that the level of modernization of a telecommunications network has an economically important influence on the amount of high tech white collar activity in a region while it is less important for manufacturing activity which typically employs less modern telecommunications services copyright 1995 by oxford university press

structural uncertainty and subsidy removal for economies in transition abstract economies in transition are faced with a high degree of structural uncertainty i e uncertainty about which it is possible to learn through experience we study structural uncertainty s effects on a subsidy removal program subsidy removal causes unemployment but yields fiscal benefits and facilitates private sector growth when the policymaker does not know the speed with which the private sector absorbs the unemployed he will be driven toward a more decisive and therefore more informative policy the model also rationalizes policy reversals and implies that irreversibility constraints and political instability dampen the learning effect making policy more gradualist

sunk costs and regulation in the u s pesticide industry abstract this paper examines the impact of sunk costs and market demand on the number of innovative companies the u s market share of foreign based firms and merger choice in the u s pesticide industry results are consistent with sutton s 1991 view of sunk costs and market structure in that rising endogenous sunk research costs and exogenous sunk pesticide product regulation costs and declining demand negatively affect the number of firms in the industry have a stronger negative impact on the number of smaller firms and encourage foreign based firm expansion

irreversible investment under uncertainty in oligopoly abstract an oligopoly is studied where firms facing a stochastic inverse demand curve use capacity as strategic variable capacity may be adjusted continuously over time with linear cost the analysis uses the technique of a fictitious social planner and the theory of irreversible investment under uncertainty examples indicate that qualitatively the price process will be similar in oligopoly and competitive equilibrium when firms are nonidentical e g in initial size and even if they are alike in other respects substantial time may pass until they are all the same size much of that time one firm may dominate the market

the role of acquisitions in foreign direct investment evidence from the u s stock market this paper examines foreign direct investment by studying shareholder wealth gains for 1273 u s firms acquired during the period 1970 1987 three findings stand out first cross border takeovers are more frequent in research and development intensive industries than are domestic acquisitions furthermore in three fourths of cross border transactions the buyer and seller are in related industries these industry patterns suggest that costs and imperfections in product markets play an important role in foreign direct investment second targets of foreign buyers have significantly higher wealth gains than do targets of u s firms this cross border effect is comparable in size to the wealth effects of all cash and multiple bids two effects receiving substantial attention in the finance literature and is robust to inclusion of these two variables third while the cross border effect on wealth gains is not well explained by industry and tax variables it is positively related to the weakness of the u s dollar indicating a significant role for exchange rate movements in foreign direct investment

turbulence in growing and declining industries turbulence over the industry life cycle is examined for the case of portugal using the lowest possible level of industry aggregation thus allowing for the use of panel data to study the evolution of product markets replacement of exiting firms by subsequent entrants plays a primary role in generating turbulence in high growth markets while displacement of incumbents by recent entrants is the main selection force in declining markets as the industry life cycle progresses trial and error entry and entry mistakes decrease and turbulence subsides

r d induced industry polarization and shake outs abstract we consider the standard two stage game of r d and cournot competition with ex ante identical firms but depart from the literature in assuming that r d is characterized by mildly instead of strongly decreasing returns to scale we establish that only extreme r d levels are possible at equilibrium and that for a broad range of parameters equilibria are asymmetric in r d levels possibly leading one firm to endogenously exit this provides a simple link between returns to scale in r d and industry polarization including shake outs a novelty is that exit may be triggered by positive opportunities in a strategic setting given the original nature of our r d equilibrium a complete welfare analysis is conducted including a possible role for r d subsidies

estimating a war of attrition the case of the us movie theater industry this paper estimates the impact of competition and exogenous demand decline on the exit process of movie theaters in the us from 1950 1965 i modify fudenberg and tirole 1986 s model of exit in a duopoly with incomplete information to an oligopoly i estimate this model with panel data using variations in tv diusion across house holds and other market characteristics to identify the parameters in the theater s payo function and the distribution of unobservable exit values using the estimated model i show that theaters who are making negative pro ts may choose to remain in the market if they expect to outlast their competitors because at that point their pro ts would increase this creates a signi cant delay in the exit process in addition by decompos ing the across market variation in the exit process i nd that tv diusion explains a substantial proportion of the variation in the exit process

the impact of debt financing on entry and exit in a duopoly this article investigates the interaction between market entry company foreclosure and capital structure in a duopoly we find that the order in which firms foreclose is determined not only by differences in firm specific factors but also by common economic factors such as the interest rate and the market profit volatility we extend the exit model by allowing financially distressed firms to renegotiate their debt contracts through a one off debt exchange offer we find that firms with high bankruptcy costs or with prospects of profit improvement can get bigger reductions on their debt repayments investigating market entry we find that financial vulnerability of the incumbent induces earlier entry article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

a note on capacity reduction and the role of firm size in declining industries declining industries have been explained by game theoretic approaches with size as the determining factor as to who exits first benefits and costs of capacity reduction have been neglected and are discussed here when a strategically behaving firm initially reduces capacity it can force small competitors from the market by internalizing the benefits of capacity reduction the second factor that determines exit refers to transfering capacity to other markets first to exit are those firms that are good at reducing their exit costs by finding new markets for their assets

persistence of leadership in product innovation in a firm model of vertical product differentiation three distinct patterns of market shares emerge as an equilibrium outcome reflecting three distinct strategies in respect of timing of the introduction of new products the main novelty relative to the existing literature on vertical product differentiation lies in the incorporation of learning by doing this assumption generates stability of market share patterns over a sequence of product innovations copyright 1992 by blackwell publishing ltd

the employment consequences of private equity acquisitions the case of institutional buy outs there is a growing controversy as to the impact of private equity acquisitions especially in terms of their impact on employment and subsequent organizational performance it has been suggested that closer owner supervision and the injection of a new management team revitalize the acquired organization and unlock dormant capabilities and value however both politicians and trade unionists suggest that private equity acquirers may significantly reallocate value away from employees to short term investors typically through layoffs and reduced wages which may undermine future organizational sustainability this article investigates this in the context of a sample of institutional buy outs ibos undertaken in the uk between 1997 and 2006 specifically we examine the impact of ibos on both employment and remuneration against two control groups of non acquired firms in designing our study we follow the empirical approach taken by conyon et al 2001 and conyon et al 2002 in investigating the employment consequences of regular takeovers our main finding is a significant loss in employment in firms subject to an ibo in the year immediately following the acquisition as well as lower wage rates when compared to either of the two control groups furthermore we find no evidence of a subsequent improvement either in productivity or profitability in the acquired businesses

the extent of the market examines the classical theory of the market in this paper authors consider the role of price market determination price movement in competitive and monopolistic markets extension of commodity markets

actively learning by pricing a model of an experimenting seller this article presents a model of a rational seller who is actively learning the slope of his demand curve via his pricing strategy consequently this seller optimally experiments with his price resulting price patterns show a tendency for discreteness as observed in the data which has proved to be a major challenge to most price setting models the experimentation motive can also replicate the observation that prices are more volatile than costs as well as the presence of many idiosyncratic price changes in the data it can do so without a need to assume the existence of large idiosyncratic shocks

potential foreign competition in us manufacturing abstract trade barriers are falling and firms are competing in increasingly open international markets the data reveal considerable heterogeneity across industries in the intertemporal path of import shares against this backdrop we focus on an issue that is increasingly important for competition policy analysis potential foreign competition inadequate attention to this aspect could result in a biased picture of total competition leading to misguided antitrust decisions drawing on the conceptual framework outlined by landes and posner harvard law review 94 1981 937 we measure potential foreign competition by the intertemporal response of industry import share to industry specific and aggregate economic factors and our estimates indicate wide variation across industries in this dimension a particularly striking finding is that highly concentrated industries which are more likely to be subject to antitrust scrutiny have a greater degree of potential foreign competition than industries with low concentration even though the extent of actual foreign competition is similar across these groups of industries

second mover advantage and entry timing we describe a model of entry timing assuming that a second mover can benefit from observing the experience of a first mover we focus on how market attractiveness characteristics such as size and cost affect the time until first entry the effects depend on whether the number of participants is exogenous or endogenous in the former case a more attractive market leads to earlier entry in the latter case it leads to later entry treating the number of firms as an integer free entry leads to non monotone but testable effects of market attractiveness on entry timing

multinational firms acquisitions and job tasks we revisit the question how inward fdi and multinational ownership affect relative labor demand motivated by the recent literature that distinguish between skills and tasks we argue that the impact of multinational and foreign ownership on the demand for labor is better captured by focusing on job tasks rather than education we use swedish matched employer employee data and find that changes of local firms to both foreign and swedish multinationals increase the relative demand for non routine and interactive job tasks in the targeted local firms hence in a high income country both inward and outward fdi have a task upgrading impact on local firms the effect is primarily driven by wage effects leading to increased wage dispersion for workers with different non routine and interactive task intensity we also show that the effect is not the same as skill upgrading since dividing employees by educational attainment does not capture changes in the relative labor demand hence our results suggest a new aspect of the labor market consequences of fdi less

temporary acceleration of inflation what can a central bank learn from it in this article i present a model in which the monetary authority conducts policy by setting money supply in the presence of uncertainty and bayesian learning about the economic environment i find that there exists a set of assumptions under which a temporary acceleration of money growth and thus of inflation increases the government s overall expected utility there also exists a set of assumptions under which a temporary deceleration of money growth and thus of inflation increases the govern ment s overall expected utility

a comment on a model of vertical product differentiation in a duopoly model with vertical differentiation if the firms do not cover the market the lower quality firm chooses a quality level exactly 4 7 of that of the higher quality firm and chooses a price that is 2 7 of the price of the higher quality firm copyright 1992 by blackwell publishing ltd

the productivity effects of bank mergers evidence from the uk building societies abstract this paper presents an empirical investigation of the impact of acquisition activity on financial intermediary productivity specifically it uses an augmented production function approach to investigate the impact of acquisition after controls for input changes the model is estimated on an unbalanced panel of 93 uk building societies over the period 1981 1993 using data on their core financial intermediation activities which it is suggested are particularly appropriate for our purposes in contrast to much of the existing merger literature which for the most part uses financial performance data our results do indicate significant and substantial productivity gains following acquisition these are consistent with an acquisitions process in which less efficient firms are acquired and reorganized the post merger gains appear to increase substantially in the post deregulation period when pressures to minimize cost are widely considered to have increased

exit in duopoly under uncertainty this paper examines a declining duopoly where the firms must choose when to exit from the market the uncertainty is modeled by letting the revenue stream follow a geometric brownian motion we consider the markovperfect equilibrium in firms exit strategies with a low degree of uncertainty there is a unique equilibrium where one of the fi rms always exits before the other however when uncertainty is increased another equilibrium with the reversed order of exit may appear ruining the uniqueness whether this happens or not depends on the degree of asymmetry in the firm specifi cp arameters

small firms and technological development in the food processing machinery industry the case of pasta and other cereal derivative machines in italy this study about italian producers of machines and plants for pasta basic cereals snacks and bread factories attempts to shed some light on the role played by small and medium sized enterprises smes in the italian industry even if the high diffusion of smes has positively affected the performance of italian economy during the seventies and the eighties the new trends of technological change and global competition are expected to be unfavourable to this category of enterprises in the nineties the analyses of a significant sample of firms makes clear that the industry is in the middle of a positive restructuring process the structure of this sector shows a division of labour based on deverticalization of production and a process of internationalization focused on exports and not on direct investments or joint ventures abroad leading firms are following growth strategies by new investments and acquisitions finally as far as technological change is concerned there is a significant increase of process innovations thanks to the use of electronic components

multinationals cross border acquisitions and wage dispersion we examine the impact of cross border acquisitions on intra firm wage dispersion using a detailed swedish linked employer employee data set including data on all firms and about 50 of the swedish labour force with information on job tasks and education foreign acquisitions of domestic multinationals and local firms increase wage dispersion but so do also other types of cross border acquisitions hence it is the acquisition itself rather than foreign ownership that increases wage dispersion the positive wage effect is concentrated to ceos and other managers whereas other groups are either negatively affected or not affected at all

investment as a process of search this paper analyzes optimal capital accumulation in the face of structural uncertainty in which the firm does not fully know its own profit function and can discover it only through further investment it is shown that under structural uncertainty capital accumulation is gradual even when adjustment costs are linear and not convex it is further shown that structural uncertainty creates an incentive to market research the paper also presents an example of structural uncertainty in which an additional price uncertainty has a negative effect on investment contrary to the standard models

investment under uncertainty irreversibility and the arrival of information over time in this paper we consider a risk neutral competitive firm which is uncertain about the true state of demand we build upon arrow by demonstrating that the irreversibility of investment in physical capital together with the anticipation of receiving information and of learning the state of demand lead to 1 cautious investment behaviour and hence to lower investment levels than otherwise since the firm cannot disinvest if market conditions turn out to be less favourable than currently anticipated 2 a time varying risk premium or marginal adjustment cost which is shown to arise endogenously and to be positively related to the investment level and to the anticipation of greater information in the sense of blackwell 1951 1953 3 a gradual adjustment of the capital stock to the desired level defined as the optimal capital stock corresponding to the true state of demand

experimentation with accumulation abstract we study signal dependent experimentation in the presence of accumulation and show that the passive learner s action surprisingly coincides with the experimentor s when the unknown term is the one determining the decay rate of the stock while they differ when the parameter being learned is the one measuring the accumulation rate these results highlight the importance of the dynamic structure of the problem in signal dependent experimentation moreover they have important consequences for the pollution accumulation debate currently in progress

valuing an investment project using no arbitrage and the alpha maxmin criteria from knightian uncertainty to risk we consider a two period irreversible investment decision problem in which the firm can either invest in period 0 or in period 1 the firm is assumed to be able to specify a set of three scenarios or more but not a probability measure assuming the option to wait is valued with the no arbitrage principle when the firm makes use of the criteria maxmin we show the firm ends up with a known probability measure that assigns a positive probability to three or four scenarios only

exit from the hospital industry we study the exit of hospitals from the market for inpatient services more generous hospital reimbursement significantly reduces the probability of exit throughout the 1990s conditional on reimbursement levels hospital efficiency was not a significant determinant in the early 1990s but in the mid to late 1990s less efficient hospitals were significantly more likely to exit throughout the period high tech services increased the probability of survival and for profit hospitals were more likely to exit the role of medicare as a determinant of exit became less important in the latter half of the 1990s

impact of government intervention on employment change and plant closure in northern ireland 1983 97 harris r and trainor m 2007 impact of government intervention on employment change and plant closure in northern ireland 1983 97 regional studies 41 51 63 financial assistance to manufacturing industry is an important element of the industrial development policy in northern ireland this paper uses the individual plant level records of the annual respondents database ard for the northern ireland manufacturing sector 1983 97 matched to the plant level details of financial support provided by the industrial development board to examine the effect of selective financial assistance sfa on employment change and plant closure it is found that sfa concentrated on protecting existing rather than new enterprises in terms of employment change using a hazard model it is found that the receipt of sfa significantly reduced the probability of plant closure by on average between 15 and 24 harris r et trainor m 2007 l impact de l intervention gouvernementale sur l evolution de l emploi et la fe

the econometrics of panel data handbook of theory and applications preface 1 formulation and estimation of econometric models for panel data m nerlove p balestra part i linear models 2 introduction to linear models for panel data p balestra 3 fixed effect models and fixed coefficient models p balestra 4 error components models l matyas 5 random coefficients models cheng hsiao 6 linear dynamic models p sevestre a trognon 7 simultaneous equations j krishnakumar 8 panel data with measurement error e biorn 9 specification issues b h baltagi appendix matrix algebra for linear models part ii nonlinear models 10 introduction to nonlinear models c gourieroux 11 logit and probit models cheng hsiao 13 incomplete panels and selection bias m verbeek t nijman 14 pseudo panel data m verbeek 15 point processes j p florens d fougere part iii selected applications introduction to the applications z griliches 16 dynamic labour demand models g bresson f kramarz p sevestre 17 econometric models of company investment r blundell s bond c meghir 18 consumption dynamics and panel data a survey j m robin 19 estimation of labour supply functions using panel data a survey f laisney w pohlmeier m staat 20 individual labour market transitions d fougere t kamionka 21 modelling companies divident policy using account panel data j f malecot 22 software review p blanchard index

the persistence of market leadership evidence from japan this article explores the persistence of market leadership in japanese manufacturing industries over the period 1975 2004 by applying survival data techniques we examine how long market leadership persists and how the duration of market leadership varies according to industry specific characteristics our findings indicate that market leaders maintain their leadership positions for on average 20 years from 1975 in japanese manufacturing industries we provide evidence that market leadership tends to persist in capital intensive and legally cartelized industries whereas it is less likely to persist in demand volatile r d intensive and import intensive industries copyright 2009 the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

conglomerate entrenchment under optimal financial contracting we provide a formal analysis of the notion that conglomerates are more entrenched as they have deeper pockets using the financial contracting model of bolton and scharfstein 1990 we can isolate two effects that confirm this conjecture the pooling of cash flows which allows to smooth out repayments and the ability to obtain better credit terms for less profitable business segments the internal capital market operated in a conglomerate may however work in the opposite direction increasing the sensitivity of operations to own cash flows and increasing the likelihood of exit

the devolution of declining industries in declining industries capacity must be reduced in order to restore profitability who bears this burden where production is all or nothing there is a unique subgame perfect equilibrium the largest firms exit first ghemawat and nalebuff 1985 in this paper firms continuously adjust capacity again there is a unique subgame perfect equilibrium all else equal large firms reduce capacity first and continue to do so until they shrink to the size of their formerly smaller rivals intuitively bigger firms have lower marginal revenue and correspondingly greater incentives to reduce capacity this prediction is supported by empirical findings

choice under uncertainty with the best and worst in mind neo additive capacities the concept of a non extreme outcome additive capacity neo additive capacity is introduced neo additive capacities model optimistic and pessimistic attitudes towards uncertainty as observed in many experimental studies moreover neo additive capacities can be applied easily in economic problems as we demonstrate by examples this paper provides an axiomatisation of choquet expected utility with neo capacities in a framework of purely subjective uncertainty

preemption games under levy uncertainty abstract we study a stochastic version of fudenberg tirole s preemption game two firms contemplate entering a new market with stochastic demand firms differ in sunk costs of entry if the demand process has no upward jumps the low cost firm enters first and the high cost firm follows if leader s optimization problem has an interior solution the leader enters at the optimal threshold of a monopolist otherwise the leader enters earlier than the monopolist if the demand admits positive jumps then the optimal entry threshold of the leader can be lower than the monopolist s threshold even if the solution is interior simultaneous entry can happen either as an equilibrium or a coordination failure the high cost firm can become the leader we characterize subgame perfect equilibrium strategies in terms of stopping times and value functions analytical expressions for the value functions and thresholds that define stopping times are derived

decision theory under ambiguity we review recent advances in the field of decision making under uncertainty or ambiguity we start with a presentation of the general approach to a decision problem under uncertainty as well as the standard bayesian treatment and issues with this treatment we present more general approaches choquet expected utility maximin expected utility smooth ambiguity and so forth that have been developed in the literature under the name of models of ambiguity sensitive preferences we draw a distinction between fully subjective models and models incorporating explicitly some information we review definitions and characterizations of ambiguity aversion in these models we mention the challenges posed by some of the models presented we end with a review of part of the experimental literature and applications of these models to economic settings

put call parity and market frictions abstract we extend the fundamental theorem of finance and the pricing rule representation theorem to the case in which market frictions are taken into account but the put call parity is still assumed to hold in turn we obtain a representation of the pricing rule as a discounted expectation with respect to a nonadditive risk neutral probability

industry competition and firm human capital this paper argues that objective and subjective human capital may have substantial impact upon organizational performance in a competitive context objective human capital pertains to such features as education and experience whereas subjective human capital relates to personality characteristics the argument is illustrated by presenting the results of two empirical studies 1 a cross section 1990 1991 analysis of about 50 incumbents in the flemish furniture industry concentrating on the impact of subjective human capital particularly the chief executive officer s ceo s locus of control personality on financial performance and 2 a longitudinal 1970 1992 analysis of a cohort of 100 entrants into the dutch audit industry focusing on the influence of objective human capital particularly education and experience on exit by merger and acquisition m a or diaspora both studies support the claim that objective and subjective human capital matters for example flemish furniture firms headed by a ceo with an internal locus of control trait reach higher levels of financial performance and dutch audit firms with a high proportion of personnel with business experience are more likely to exit the industry over the years as a result of diaspora finally the data of the flemish furniture and dutch audit industries are re analyzed so as to compare the impact of human capital variables on small firm performance in both industries this re analysis reveals that in both industries the impact of human capital variables is more pronounced in large firms compared to small businesses

capabilities transaction costs and firm boundaries although the literature on firm boundaries has been greatly influenced by transaction cost economics strategy scholars often emphasize the importance of capabilities considerations in these decisions this has led to a debate that we suggest has generated more heat than light we argue that the two sets of considerations are in fact so intertwined dynamically that treating them as independent competitive explanations is fundamentally misleading we offer a theoretical synthesis of transaction cost and capabilities approaches to firm boundaries that seeks to overcome each approach s limitations and provides a unified and logically consistent understanding of boundary decisions

entry and exit over the industry life cycle this article presents a theoretical model of the rivalry between two firms in a market that undergoes a life cycle of growth and eventual decline firms in this market have the option of exit and reentry in the equilibrium for the growth phase high entry costs can act like high exit costs thereby conveying a commitment advantage for some parameter configurations this advantage is sufficient to enable a high costfirm to preempt its lower cost rival during the decline phase the smaller duopolist is able to outlast its rival provided that the smaller firm s reentry costs are positive

class versus industry cleavages inter industry factor mobility and the politics of trade domestic political conflict has been a constant companion to international trade but the nature of that conflict has varied greatly in western democracies over the last two centuries political battles over trade policy appear to have sometimes divided societies along broad class lines and at other times split them into narrow industry based coalitions i argue that this diversity stems from historical and cross national variation in inter industry factor mobility class coalitions are more likely where factor mobility is high whereas narrow industry based coalitions are more likely where mobility is low evidence from six western economies for the last two centuries indicates that levels of factor mobility have varied historically and cross nationally in accord with industrialization and regulation this variation corresponds broadly with observable differences in the formation of trade policy coalitions

empirical evidence on ftc enforcement of the merger guidelines the justice department s 1982 1984 merger guidelines identify various factors concentration entry barriers ease of collusion efficiency that would thereafter determine whether the government will challenge a merger analysts have criticized enforcement agencies however for not following the guidelines and criticize the guidelines themselves for not identifying the weights attached to the factors using a 1982 86 sample of seventy horizontal mergers we examine which factors influenced federal trade commission decisions to challenge mergers the relative importance of the guidelines and other factors in merger challenges is measured and related empirical issues are also explored i introduction the 1982 1984 merger guidelines adopted by the antitrust division of the department of justice doj and followed by the federal trade commission ftc marked important antitrust policy changes by the reagan administration the herfindahl index replaced the fourfirm ratios used in the old 1968 guidelines as the measure of concentration other non concentration factors barriers to entry ease of collusion were elevated in importance in the 1984 revision of the 1982 guidelines efficiency considerations were for the first time generally included as a relevant factor however commentators who applauded the newer guidelines have complained subsequently that the reagan administration did not apply them the objections of two veteran academic antitrusters krattenmaker and pitofsky 1988 232 are typical certainly in many respects the announced merger guidelines are a substantial accomplishment this accomplishment however has been almost completely undercut by the administration s behavior in ignoring those guidelines in practice and instead enforcing without any public explanation a merger policy that was not only exceptionally lenient but substantially at odds with professed standards in an earlier paper coate et al 1990 we along with coauthor richard higgins tested one hypothesis why merger policy at least at the ftc in 1982 86 has departed from mere enforcement of the guidelines politics we showed how external pressures imposed on the commission by congress to block mergers independent of the factors identified in the guidelines as meriting a merger challenge are a statistically significant factor in the ftc s decision whether to challenge a merger in the present paper we use the same data seventy horizontal mergers from 1982 to 1986 to examine in greater detail the charges that the ftc has not followed the guidelines plus several related issues not considered in our earlier article these include the extent to which various guidelines factors are either necessary or sufficient for the commission to vote to challenge a merger and the role of the new efficiency criterion in merger evaluation an econometric model is presented as one approach to determine how the ftc balances the various guidelines factors this allows an estimate of the relative importance and influence of lawyers and economists in the evaluation process finally the data also permit an appraisal of the extent to which a structuralist or chicago approach to competition issues dominated merger votes at the ftc during the relevant period section ii discusses briefly the factors identified in the merger guidelines and the process by which the commission determines whether to oppose a proposed merger that section also identifies several testable hypotheses concerning the commission s reliance on the guidelines variables section iii then explains the data to be used for testing section iv the bulk of the paper presents empirical evidence concerning the ftc s use of the guidelines and related issues ii evaluating mergers at the federal trade commission the merger guidelines the federal trade commission enforces along with the justice department the federal antitrust laws including those applicable to mergers

an investigation of the determinants of manufacturing employment in the united kingdom in this paper we present and estimate an adjustment cost model of industry employment which takes explicit account of both expectations and aggregation over different labour types the resulting model is subject to a large number of tests and is a highly robust representation of the data finally forecasts are produced for manufacturing employment up to 1990

exit with vertical product differentiation abstract this paper presents a duopoly model of exit from a declining industry with vertical product differentiation it extends previous io models on exit that have so far ignored demand effects the model shows how the interplay between demand and technological factors determine the order of exit therefore demand factors are relevant and should be taken into account thus the firm with a longer tenure as a profitable monopolist does not necessarily outlast its rival in addition this paper argues that the low quality firm may find it optimal to stay in the market despite making temporary losses to outlast its rival

consolidation by merger the uk beer market this paper examines the determinants of market structure in the uk brewing industry over 1949 1969 sutton sunk costs and market structure price competition advertising and the evolution of concentration 1991 points to technology and advertising races as two key drivers of market concentration this study uses an own built longitudinal data set of the population of firms and breweries and reveals the importance of institutional factors in explaining the dynamics of market structure the practice of tying outlets to brewers and legal restrictions on opening retail outlets together with a permissive policy towards mergers made acquisition of medium sized firms and brewery closure shortly after acquisition the main driving mechanism towards industry consolidation during this period the number of firms and plants fell sharply by 74 and 60 respectively and production rose by about 25 with no firm entry and just one new brewery opening as a result concentration increased and the market transformed from a highly fragmented one into a stable oligopoly