nonlinear mean reversion in the short term interest rate using a new bayesian method for the analysis of diffusion processes this article finds that the nonlinear drift in interest rates found in a number of previous studies can be confirmed only under prior distributions that are best described as informative the assumption of stationarity which is common in the literature represents a nontrivial prior belief about the shape of the drift function this belief and the use of flat priors contribute strongly to the finding of nonlinear mean reversion implementation of an approximate jeffreys prior results in virtually no evidence for mean reversion in interest rates unless stationarity is assumed finally the article documents that nonlinear drift is primarily a feature of daily rather than monthly data and that these data contain a transitory element that is not reflected in the volatility of longermaturity yields the drift of the short term interest rate is an important determinant of a wide variety of asset prices both inside and outside the boundaries of what is often called fixed income while volatilities may be estimated relatively accurately using high frequency observations of the short rate the short rate s extreme persistence makes identifying the true shape of the drift function a particularly elusive goal if our goal is merely to fit prices then the difficulty in estimating a drift function can be avoided by backing out implied drifts using a no arbitrage approach such as hull and white 1990 or heath jarrow and morton 1992 these methods bypass the true distribution entirely focusing on solving for the risk neutral drift function that is consistent with the cross section of bond prices if our goal however is to learn from prices and to be able to assess theories such as the expectations hypothesis that link short and long rates then estimating the drift function under the true measure is unavoidable in several recent articles a variety of sophisticated econometric techniques have been brought to bear on the problem in particular

estimation of an asymmetric stochastic volatility model for asset returns a stochastic volatility model may be estimated by a quasi maximum likelihood procedure by transforming to a linear state space form the method is extended to handle correlation between the two disturbances in the model and applied to data on stock returns

fishing downstream the political economy of effective administered protection it is common knowledge that consuming downstream industries are harmed by import barriers placed on primary or intermediate upstream products the authors empirically examine th e natural result of these forces the flow of protection winding its way downstream after first discussing the effects of upstream protecti on on the supply and demand for protection downstream the authors exam ine recent trends in u s antidumping and countervailing duty cases in t wo major industry sectors metals and chemicals which between them fil ed more than 70 percent of all such cases in both chemicals and metals the tendency for upstream import protection to spread downstream is observed

financial development and financing constraints international evidence from the structural investment model this article provides evidence that financial development impacts growth by reducing financing constraints that would otherwise distort efficient allocation of investment the financing constraints are inferred from the investment euler equation by assuming that the firm s stochastic discount factor is a function of the firm s financial position specifically the stock of liquid assets the magnitude of the changes in the cost of capital is twice as large in a country with a low level of financial development as in a country with an average level of financial development the size effect business cycles and legal environment effects are also considered copyright 2003 oxford university press

systemic co jumps abstract the simultaneous occurrence of jumps in several stocks can be associated with major financial news triggers short term predictability in stock returns is correlated with sudden spikes of the variance risk premium and determines a persistent increase decrease of stock variances and correlations when they come along with bad good news these systemic events and their implications can be easily overlooked by traditional univariate jump statistics applied to stock indices they are instead revealed in a clearly cut way by using a novel test procedure applied to individual assets which is particularly effective on high volume stocks

informational rigidities and the stickiness of temporary sales abstract how do retailers react to cost changes while temporary sales account for 95 of price change in our data retail prices respond to a wholesale cost increase entirely through the regular price sales actually respond temporarily in the opposite direction from regular prices as though to conceal the price hike additional evidence from responses to commodity cost and local unemployment shocks as well as broader evidence from bls data reinforces these findings institutional evidence indicates that sales are complex contingent contracts determined substantially in advance in a standard price discrimination model these institutional practices leave little money on the table

lobbying counterlobbying and the structure of tariff protection in poor and rich countries a political economy model of protection is used to determine endogenously the intersectoral patterns of protection three propositions are derived that are consistent with the stylized patterns of tariff protection in rich and poor countries nominal protection rates escalate with the degree of processing protection is higher on average in poor countries and rich countries protect agriculture relatively more than they protect manufacturing whereas poor countries do the reverse numerical simulations for archetypal rich and poor economies confirm that the endogenously determined structure of protection is broadly consistent with observed patterns of protection

rigid prices evidence from u s scanner data this paper uses over two years of weekly scanner data from two small us cities to characterize time and state dependence of grocers pricing decisions in these data the probability of a nominal adjustment declines with the time since the last price change even after controlling for heterogeneity across store product cells and replacing sale prices with regular prices we also detect state dependence the probability of a nominal adjustment is highest when a store s price substantially diers from the average of other stores prices however extreme prices typically reflect the selling store s recent nominal adjustments rather than changes in other stores prices

cascading contingent protection and vertical market structure abstract cascading contingent protection may occur when protection of an upstream industry transfers injury to the downstream industry and increases the likelihood that this industry asks and receives protection this paper examines cascading protection within a sequential petitioning model where the upstream industry acts as leader the analysis identifies market structure and the vertical linkage between the upstream and the downstream industry as important determinants of the occurrence of cascading protection it is shown that the circumstances which make cascading protection more likely to occur also make it more likely that this protection has serious negative welfare consequences

the flat rental puzzle 4cars and replace them after 2 years or when their odometer exceeds 34 000 km this is a very costly 5 strategy caused by rapid depreciation in used car prices we show how economic theory predicts that 6 in a competitive market cars are rented out covering their full economic lifespan and rental prices are 7 a declining function of their odometer value our solution to these puzzles is that actual rental markets 8 are not fully competitive and firms may be behaving suboptimally we provide a case study of a large 9 car rental company that provided us access to its operating data we develop a model of the company s 10 operations that predicts that the company can significantly increase its profits by keeping its rental cars 11 twice as long as it currently does and also by discounting the rental cost of older vehicles to induce 12 its customers to rent them the company undertook an experiment to test our model s predictions 13 we report initial findings from this experiment which involved over 4500 rentals of over 500 cars in 14 4 locations over a 5 month period the results are consistent with the predictions of our model and 15 suggest that a properly chosen declining rental price function can increase overall revenues profits 16 also increase significantly since doubling the holding period of rental cars cuts discounted replacement 17 costs by nearly 40 18

the chilling trade effects of antidumping proliferation advocates of antidumping ad laws downplay their negative effects by arguing that the trade flows that are subject to ad are small and their distortions negligible but while the adverse effect of ad on product level trade has long been established the question remains whether there are trade effects at the aggregate level the recent proliferation wave of ad laws and their use provides us with a unique policy change to estimate the true trade effects of adopting and enforcing ad laws for this purpose we estimate the effect of ad on bilateral trade flows between the new adopters of ad laws and their trade partners using a gravity model of annual observations 1980 2000 our estimates show that ad has trade chilling effects on aggregate import volumes but the impacts are heterogeneous across sectors we find that new tough users experience a chilling of their aggregate imports of 14 billion us a year or 5 9 as a result of ad measures for some countries like mexico and india the dampening effects of ad laws on trade flows are found to substantially offset the increase in trade volumes derived from trade liberalization

inference on self exciting jumps in prices and volatility using high frequency measures summary dynamic jumps in the price and volatility of an asset are modelled using a joint hawkes process in conjunction with a bivariate jump diffusion a state space representation is used to link observed returns plus nonparametric measures of integrated volatility and price jumps to the specified model components with bayesian inference conducted using a markov chain monte carlo algorithm an evaluation of marginal likelihoods for the proposed model relative to a large number of alternative models including some that have featured in the literature is provided an extensive empirical investigation is undertaken using data on the s p 500 market index over the 1996 2014 period with substantial support for dynamic jump intensities including in terms of predictive accuracy documented copyright 2016 john wiley sons ltd

the effect of ownership structure on prices in geographically differentiated industries i analyze how ownership structure and market geography jointly influence fast food prices i estimate a model of demand and supply that accounts for the market geography and run counterfactual experiments that demonstrate how mergers affect prices i find that the impact of mergers can be large that this impact decreases as the merging outlets are farther apart that mergers among market leaders generally increase prices more than mergers among weaker firms and that mergers can increase prices even if the outlets are so far apart that neither outleti s presence affects prices at the other before the merger

managed trade the us mexico sugar suspension agreements under the 1994 north american free trade agreement mexican sugar producers were ultimately granted free access to the us sugar market while all other suppliers including us refiners were subject to supply quotas following a surge in imports of mexican sugar the american sugar coalition initiated anti dumping and countervailing duty adcvd proceedings against mexico in early 2014 in december 2014 the adcvd cases were halted as a result of two suspension agreements negotiated between the us and mexico this paper contributes to a small number of empirical studies that have estimated the impact of suspension agreements we measure the impacts of the adcvd filings and the suspension agreements on us domestic raw and refined prices the raw to refined margin and the quantity and composition of sugar imports from mexico results suggest us raw sugar prices increased by 3 per lb 14 under adcvd proceedings equivalent to an ad valorem tariff between 40 and 50 while the suspension agreements increased us raw sugar prices by 5 70 tariff equivalent us refined sugar prices increased by similar amounts under the adcvd proceedings and the suspension agreements 4 5 per lb ultimately both the adcvd proceedings and the suspension agreements significantly reduced sugar imports from mexico us sugar refiner economic welfare hinges critically on the quantity and composition of raw sugar imports as such refiner revenue following the adcvd filings and suspension agreements is estimated to have declined by 16 relative to a free trade environment

wto tariff commitments and temporary protection complements or substitutes abstract there is a long held notion in the trade policy literature that traditional tariff instruments and temporary protection tp measures are substitutes despite this prediction there is only mixed empirical evidence for a link between tariff reductions and the usage pattern of antidumping safeguard and countervailing duties based on recent theoretical advances i argue in this paper that the relevant trade policy margin for implementing tp measures is instead tariff overhangs the difference between wto bound and applied tariffs lower tariff overhangs constrain countries to raise their mfn applied rates without legal repercussions independent of past tariff changes using detailed sectoral data for a sample of 30 wto member countries during the period 1996 2014 i find strong evidence for an inverse link between tariff overhangs and tp activity this result implies that tariff overhangs and tp measures are substitutes vindicating the importance of existing tariff commitments as a key determinant of alternative protection instruments

exploring return dynamics via corridor implied volatility some fundamental questions regarding equity index return dynamics are difficult to address due to the latent character of spot volatility we exploit tick by tick option quotes to compute a novel corridor volatility index which may serve as an observable proxy for short term volatility exploiting this index we find that equity index volatility jumps are common symmetrically distributed and cojump with the underlying returns moreover the return volatility asymmetry is more pronounced than is generally recognized and is in force for both diffusive and jump innovations in volatility finally the index performs admirably during turbulent market conditions constituting a useful real time gauge of market stress

creating micro marketing pricing strategies using supermarket scanner data micro marketing refers to the customization of marketing mix variables to the store level this paper shows how prices can be profitably customized at the store level rather than adopting a uniform pricing policy across all stores historically there has been a trend by retailers to consolidate independent stores into large national and regional chains this move toward consolidation has been driven by the economies of scale associated with these larger operations however some of these large chains have lost the adaptability of independent neighborhood stores micro marketing represents an interest on the part of managers to combine the advantages of these large operations with the flexibility of independent neighborhood stores a basis for these customized pricing strategies is the result of differences in interbrand competition across stores these changes in interbrand competition are measured using weekly store level scanner data at the product level obviously this presents a huge estimation problem since we wish to measure substitution between each product at a store level for a chain with 100 stores and 10 products in a category we would need to estimate over 100 000 parameters to reliably estimate these individual store differences we phrase our problem in a hierarchical bayesian framework essentially each store level parameter can be thought of as a combination of chain level and random store specific effects the improvement in estimating this model comes from exploiting the common chain level component in addition we relate these store specific changes to demographic and competitive characteristics of the store s trading area which helps explain why these differences are present these estimated differences in price response are in turn used to set store level prices to simplify and focus the problem we limit our attention to everyday price changes i e the prices of products that are not advertised there are many marketing variables that can be adjusted at a storelevel e g promotions and product assortments the reason we concentrate upon everyday pricing is driven by its importance in the marketing mix that most profits are earned on products sold at their everyday price and the amenability of everyday prices to store level customizations a limitation of this approach is that it yields only a partial solution to the retailer s global optimization problem a challenge for the retailer in implementing micro marketing pricing strategies is to retain a consistent image while altering prices that adapt to neighborhood differences in demand our approach is to search for price changes that leave image unchanged we argue that a sufficient condition for holding the input to store image constant from everyday pricing is to hold average price and revenues at their current levels we implement this condition by introducing constraints into the profit maximization problem future research into store choice may yield more efficient conditions a benefit of holding the retailer s image constant is that it does not require costly new information about competitors and promotional activity instead retailers are able to derive these store level customizations based largely upon scanner data this is very advantageous since this information is already being collected and is readily available our results indicate that micro marketing pricing strategies would be profitable and could increase gross profit margins by 4 percent to 10 percent when these gross profit gains are considered after administrative and operating costs are taken into account they could increase operating profit margins by 33 percent to 83 percent these gains come from encouraging consumers through everyday price changes to switch to more profitable bundles of products and not through overall price changes at the chain level these results show that the information contained in the retailer s store level scanner data is an under utilized resource by exploiting this information using newer and more powerful computational techniques managers can better appreciate its value the implication is that profits could be increased and gains can be made by using this information as the basis for micro marketing

five facts about prices a reevaluation of menu cost models are price decreases 3 the frequency of price increases covaries strongly with inflation whereas the frequency of price decreases and the size of price increases and price decreases do not 4 the frequency of price change is highly seasonal it is highest in the first quarter and then declines 5 we find no evidence of upwardsloping hazard functions of price changes for individual products we show that the first second and third facts are consistent with a benchmark menu cost model whereas the fourth and fifth facts are not

equity index variance evidence from flexible parametric jump diffusion models this paper analyzes a wide range of flexible drift and diffusion specifications of stochastic volatility jump diffusion models for daily s p 500 index returns we find that model performance is driven almost exclusively by the specification of the diffusion component whereas the drift specifications is of second order importance further the variance dynamics of non affine models resemble popular non parametric high frequency estimates of variance and their outperformance is mainly accumulated during turbulent market regimes finally we show that jump diffusion models yield more reliable estimates for the expected return of variance swap contracts

the cyclicality of sales regular and effective prices business cycle and policy implications author s coibion olivier gorodnichenko yuriy hong gee hee abstract we study the cyclical properties of sales regular price changes and average prices paid by consumers effective prices using data on prices and quantities sold for numerous retailers across many us metropolitan areas inflation in the effective prices paid by consumers declines significantly with higher unemployment while little change occurs in the inflation rate of prices posted by retailers this difference reflects the reallocation of household expenditures across retailers a feature of the data which we document and quantify rather than sales we propose a simple model with household store switching and assess its implications for business cycles and policymakers jel d12 e31 e32 l25 l81

steel safeguards and the welfare of u s steel firms and downstream consumers of steel a shareholder wealth perspective this paper analyses the steel safeguards applied during 2001 3 results reveal that for shareholders of u s steel companies safeguards generated positive abnormal returns of approximately 6 the cancellation of the safeguards resulted in wealth gains of about 5 steel shareholders experienced negative abnormal returns of 5 in response to the wto ruling that the u s had violated wto law our results are consistent with the neoclassical view that producers gain at the expense of consumers also findings indicate that downstream consuming firms that diversify production in nafta countries avert some trade policy risk associated with higher steel costs caused by safeguard protection ce texte analyse l effet de la protection des acieries americaines au cours de la periode 2001 03 les resultats montrent que pour les actionnaires des societes americaines cette protection a engendre des profits anormaux de l ordre de 6 l annulation de cette protection a resulte en des gains de richesse d environ 5 les actionnaires des acieries ont subi des rendements anormaux negatifs de l ordre de 5 a la suite de la decision de l omc a savoir que les etats unis avaient enfreint la loi ces resultats sont consistants avec le point de vue neo classique qui suggere que les producteurs gagnent au detriment des consommateurs de plus les resultats indiquent que les entreprises consommatrices d acier en aval qui ont diversifie leur production dans les pays de l alena se sont premunies contre certains risques associes a la politique commerciale et aux hauts couts de l acier engendres par la protection

who thinks about the competition managerial ability and strategic entry in us local telephone markets we examine us local telephone markets shortly after the telecommunications act of 1996 the data suggest that older experienced educated managers tend to enter markets with fewer competitors this motivates a structural econometric model based on behavioral game theory that allows heterogeneity in managers ability to correctly conjecture competitor behavior we find that manager characteristics are key determinants in managerial ability furthermore our estimate of ability predicts out of sample success counterfactuals provide insight into the industry s struggles despite substantial indirect subsidies it is only when the ability to correctly conjecture competitor behavior is high that firms enter empty markets

optimal portfolios when variances and covariances can jump abstract we analyze the optimal portfolio choice in a multi asset wishart model in which return variances and correlations are stochastic and subject to jump risk the optimal portfolio is characterized by the positions in stock diffusion risk variance covariance diffusion risk and jump risk we find that including jumps in the second moments changes the optimal positions and particularly variance covariance hedging demands significantly erroneously omitting these jumps gives rise to substantial model risk furthermore variance covariance jump risk can have a significant impact on potential utility gains when the market is completed by adding derivatives as a robustness check we compare our results to those obtained for other parametrizations of wishart models from the literature as well as to various single asset models

market responses to antidumping laws some evidence from the u s chemical industry in this paper the authors provide empirical evidence of the effects of the u s antidumping law using monthly product specific macroeconomic data from the u s chemical industry over the 1976 88 period they analyze import responses highlighting the differences between allegedly dumped and nondumped import behavior at the various stages of an antidumping investigation the authors find a wide range of behavioral responses that do not necessarily appear to be dependent upon the final outcome of the investigations and in some cases contradict the accepted wisdom of the impacts these cases have upon import behavior

the leverage effect puzzle disentangling sources of bias at high frequency the leverage effect refers to the generally negative correlation between an asset return and its changes of volatility a natural estimate consists in using the empirical correlation between the daily returns and the changes of daily volatility estimated from high frequency data the puzzle lies in the fact that such an intuitively natural estimate yields nearly zero correlation for most assets tested despite the many economic reasons for expecting the estimated correlation to be negative to better understand the sources of the puzzle we analyze the different asymptotic biases that are involved in high frequency estimation of the leverage effect including biases due to discretization errors to smoothing errors in estimating spot volatilities to estimation error and to market microstructure noise this decomposition enables us to propose novel bias correction methods for estimating the leverage effect

determinants of store level price elasticity using weekly scanner data representing 18 product categories the authors estimated store specific price elasticities for a chain of 83 supermarkets they related these price sensitivities to a com

uniform pricing in us retail chains we show that most u s food drugstore and mass merchandise chains charge nearly uniform prices across stores despite wide variation in consumer demographics and competition demand estimates reveal substantial within chain variation in price elasticities and suggest that the median chain sacrifices 16 million of annual profit relative to a benchmark of optimal prices in contrast differences in average prices between chains are broadly consistent with the optimal benchmark we discuss a range of explanations for nearly uniform pricing highlighting managerial inertia and brand image concerns as mechanisms frequently mentioned by industry participants relative to our optimal benchmark uniform pricing may significantly increase the prices paid by poorer households relative to the rich dampen the response of prices to local economic shocks alter the analysis of mergers in antitrust and shift the incidence of intranational trade costs

the october 1987 s p 500 stock futures basis five minute changes in the s p 500 index and futures contract are examined over a ten day period surrounding the october 1987 stock market crash since nonsynchronous trading problems are severe in these data new index estimators are derived and used the estimators use the complete transaction history of all 500 stocks nonsynchronous trading explains part of the large absolute futures cash basis observed during the crash the remainder may be due to disintegration of the two markets even after adjustment for nonsynchronous trading the index displays more autocorrelation than does the futures and the futures leads the index

price and volatility co jumps abstract the nature of the dependence between discontinuities in prices and contemporaneous discontinuities in volatility co jumps has been reported by many as being elusive in terms of sign magnitude and statistical significance using a novel identification strategy in continuous time relying on trade level information for spot variance estimation as well as infinitesimal cross moments we document that a sizeable proportion of discontinuous changes in prices are associated with strongly anti correlated contemporaneous discontinuous changes in volatility assuming a possibly nonmonotonic pricing kernel we illustrate the equilibrium implications of price and volatility co jumps for return and variance risk premia

good volatility bad volatility and option pricing advances in variance analysis permit the splitting of the total quadratic variation of a jump diffusion process into upside and downside components recent studies establish that this decomposition enhances volatility predictions and highlight the upside downside variance spread as a driver of the asymmetry in stock price distributions to appraise the economic gain of this decomposition we design a new and flexible option pricing model in which the underlying asset price exhibits distinct upside and downside semivariance dynamics driven by the model free proxies of the variances the new model outperforms common benchmarks especially the alternative that splits the quadratic variation into diffusive and jump components

jumps in financial markets a new nonparametric test and jump dynamics this paper introduces a new nonparametric test to detect jump arrival times and realized jump sizes in asset prices up to the intra day level we demonstrate that the likelihood of misclassiflcation of jumps becomes negligible when we use high frequency returns using our test we examine jump dynamics and their distributions in the u s equity markets the results show that individual stock jumps are associated with prescheduled earnings announcements and other company speciflc news events additionally s p 500 index jumps are associated with general market news announcements this suggests difierent pricing models for individual equity options versus index op

optimal portfolio allocation with volatility and co jump risk that markowitz would like abstract we study a continuous time optimal portfolio allocation problem with volatility and co jump risk allowing prices variances and covariances to jump simultaneously differently from the traditional approach we deviate from affine models by specifying a flexible wishart jump diffusion for the co precision the inverse of the covariance matrix the optimal portfolio weights that solve the dynamic programming problem are genuinely dynamic and proportional to the instantaneous co precision reconciling optimal dynamic allocation with the static markowitz type economic intuition an application to the optimal allocation problem across hedge fund investment styles illustrates the importance of having jumps in volatility associated with jumps in price