economies of traffic density in the deregulated airline industry this article estimates a structural model of competition among hub and spoke airlines in order to measure the strength of economies of traffic density on individual route segments we find that economies of density were strong during the sample period fourth quarter 1985 stronger than previous estimates by douglas caves laurits christensen and michael tretheway derived from traditional cost function methods we also find that the airlines competitive behavior was far from collusive in the markets under study markets requiring a connection at a hub airport our structural model also provides plausible estimates of demand elasticities we use our estimates to provide a cost based rationale for the major changes in the structure of the industry following deregulation for example the increase in airport and industry wide concentration and the increase in competition at the city pair market level and to simulate the effects of a merger of airlines that share a hub

why democracies produce efficient results by applying the standard tools of microeconomic analysis i argue that democratic markets work as well as economic markets in particular i show that previous work has greatly exaggerated the existence of principal agent and informational problems in electoral markets and has drawn incorrect conclusions

imperfect information and cross autocorrelation among stock prices i develop a model to explain why stock returns are positively cross autocorrelated when market makers observe noisy signals about the value of their stocks but cannot instantaneously condition prices on the signals of other stocks which contain marketwide information the pricing error of one stock is correlated with the other signals as market makers adjust prices after observing true values or previous price changes of other stocks stock returns become positively crossautocorrelated if the signal quality differs among stocks the cross autocorrelation pattern is asymmetric i show that both own and cross autocorrelations are higher when market movements are larger

liquidity and autocorrelations in individual stock returns this paper documents a strong relationship between short run reversals and stock illiquidity even after controlling for trading volume the largest reversals and the potential contrarian trading strategy profits occur in high turnover low liquidity stocks as the price pressures caused by non informational demands for immediacy are accommodated however the contrarian trading strategy profits are smaller than the likely transactions costs this lack of profitability and the fact that the overall findings are consistent with rational equilibrium paradigms suggest that the violation of the efficient market hypothesis due to short term reversals is not so egregious after all asset prices should follow a martingale process over short horizons as systematic short run changes in fundamental values should be negligible in an efficient market with unpredictable information arrival however lehmann 1990 and jegadeesh 1990 show that contrarian strategies that exploit the short run return reversals in individual stocks generate abnormal returns of about 1 7 per week and 2 5 per month respectively subsequently ball kothari and wasley 1995 and conrad gultekin and kaul 1997 suggest that much of such reversal profitability is within the bid ask bounce theoretically the potential role of liquidity in explaining the high abnormal payoffs to short run contrarian strategies is implied by the rational equilibrium framework of campbell grossman and wang 1993 henceforth cgw in the cgw model non informational trading causes price movements that when absorbed by liquidity suppliers cause prices to revert such non informed trading is accompanied by high trading volume whereas informed trading is accompanied by little trading volume thus price changes accompanied by high low trading volume should should not revert empirically conrad hameed and niden 1994 henceforth chn find that reversal profitability increases with trading

the tragedy of the commons and economic growth why does capital flow from poor to rich countries we analyze a differential game in which all interest groups have access to a common capital stock we show that the introduction of a technology that has inferior productivity but enjoys private access may ameliorate the tragedy of the commons we use this model to analyze capital flight in many poor countries property rights are not well defined since safe bank accounts in rich countries the inferior technology are available to citizens of these countries they engage in capital flight we show that the occurrence of capital flight does not imply that opening the capital account reduces growth and welfare

price formation and liquidity in the u s treasury market the response to public information the arrival of public information in the u s treasury market sets off a two stage adjustment process for prices trading volume and bid ask spreads in a brief first stage the release of a major macroeconomic announcement induces a sharp and nearly instantaneous price change with a reduction in trading volume demonstrating that price reactions to public information do not require trading the spread widens dramatically at announcement evidently driven by inventory control concerns in a prolonged second stage trading volume surges price volatility persists and spreads remain moderately wide as investors trade to reconcile residual differences in their private views how do financial markets form prices and provide liquidity when information arrives efforts to address this issue have led to an extensive microstructure literature on equity markets and to a lesser extent on the foreign exchange fx market relatively little work has focused on the u s treasury market however in spite of its importance in its own right and the advantages it offers as an alternative testing ground for microstructure hypotheses

urban development in the united states 1690 1990 the united states transformed itself from a rural to an urban society over the last three cen turies after a century of unremarkable growth the pace of urbanization was historically un precedented between the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in the twentieth century the urban population continued to increase but in a much more dispersed manner as the sub urban population increased throughout these developments cities also exhibited considerable variation in their population sizes this paper finds that the pace and pattern of u s urban development are explained by changes in regional comparative advantage and in economies in transportation and local public goods which in turn were determined by the changes in the economic structures of cities this paper also finds that cities varied considerably in size because the larger cities reduced market transaction costs associated with coordinating greater geograph ic division of labor

portfolio return autocorrelation abstract this paper investigates whether portfolio return autocorrelation can be explained by time varying expected returns nontrading state limit orders market maker inventory policy or transaction costs evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that transaction costs cause portfolio autocorrelation by slowing price adjustment i develop a transaction cost model which predicts that prices adjust faster when changes in valuation are large in relation to the bid ask spread cross sectional tests support this prediction but time series tests do not

price discovery in the u s treasury market the impact of orderflow and liquidity on the yield curve we examine the role of price discovery in the u s treasury market through the empirical relationship between orderflow liquidity and the yield curve we find that orderflow imbalances excess buying or selling pressure can account for as much as 26 percent of the day to day variation in yields on days without major macroeconomic announcements the effect of orderflow on yields is permanent and strongest when liquidity is low all of the evidence points toward an important role of price discovery in understanding the behavior of the yield curve

accounting for central neighborhood change 1980 2010 abstract after 1980 2000 population decline and economic stagnation downtown neighborhoods in most large us cities experienced 2000 2010 population growth and gentrification stark racial differences in valuations of downtown amenities and suburban labor market opportunities among those with less than college that only emerged after 2000 are the primary drivers of these downtown neighborhood dynamics as college educated whites moved in increases in valuations of downtown amenities encouraged other whites to remain in downtowns a reversal from prior decades continued departures of less than college educated minorities were driven both by relative improvements in suburban employment opportunities for this group and their continued declines in valuations of downtown amenities our evidence highlights the importance of racial differences in valuations of potentially endogenous local amenities for understanding recent downtown gentrification

the relative productivity hypothesis of industrialization the american case 1820 to 1850 a two sector model is used to explore the role of the agricultural sector in the process of industrialization our hypothesis is that areas industrialize earlier where the wages for females and children relative to those for adult males are initially low furthermore the lower this relative productivity of females and children in the pre industrial economy the proportionately more will their relative wages increase and the higher will be the ratio of manufactured to agricultural goods the model is used to interpret the conditions that fostered the rapid industrialization of the american northeast but not the south from 1820 to 1850

does voluntary participation undermine the coase theorem abstract the coase theorem states that costless enforcement of voluntary agreements yields efficient outcomes we argue that previous treatments fail to recognize the full meaning of voluntary it requires a two stage game a non cooperative participation decision followed by coaseian bargaining only among those who choose to participate we illustrate this in a simple public goods model and find outcomes ranging from extremely inefficient to fully efficient however the efficient equilibrium is not robust to even very small transaction costs thus we cast doubt on coaseian claims of universal efficiency finally we outline a kind of coercion that restores efficiency

liquidity dynamics and cross autocorrelations this paper examines the relation between information transmission and cross autocorrelations we present a simple model where informed trading is transmitted from large to small stocks with a lag in equilibrium large stock illiquidity induced by informed trading portends stronger cross autocorrelations empirically we find that the lead lag relation increases with lagged large stock illiquidity further the lead from large stock order flows to small stock returns is stronger when large stock spreads are higher in addition this lead lag relation is stronger before macro announcements when information based trading is more likely and weaker afterward when information asymmetries are lower

trading volume and cross autocorrelations in stock returns this paper finds that trading volume is a significant determinant of the lead lag patterns observed in stock returns daily and weekly returns on high volume portfolios lead returns on low volume portfolios controlling for firm size nonsynchronous trading or low volume portfolio autocorrelations cannot explain these findings these patterns arise because returns on low volume portfolios respond more slowly to information in market returns the speed of adjustment of individual stocks confirms these findings overall the results indicate that differential speed of adjustment to information is a significant source of the cross autocorrelation patterns in short horizon stock returns both academics and practitioners have long been interested in the role played by trading volume in predicting future stock returns 1 in this paper we examine the interaction between trading volume and the predictability of short horizon stock returns specifically that due to lead lag cross autocorrelations in stock returns our investigation indicates that trading volume is a significant determinant of the cross autocorrelation patterns in stock returns 2 we find that daily or weekly returns of stocks with high trading volume lead daily or weekly returns of stocks with low trading volume additional tests indicate that this effect is related to the tendency of high volume stocks to respond rapidly and low volume stocks to respond slowly to marketwide information

a new approach to decomposition of economic time series into permanent and transitory components with particular attention to measurement of the business cycle abstract this paper introduces a general procedure for decomposition of non stationary time series into a permanent and transitory component allowing both components to be stochastic the permanent component is shown to be a random walk with drift and the transitory or cyclical component is a stationary process with mean zero the decomposition methodology which depends only on past data and therefore is computable in real time is applied to the problem of measuring and dating business cycles in the portwar u s economy we find that measured expansions and contractions are of roughly equivalent duration and that our dating of cyclical episodes tends to lead the traditional nber dating and to a lesser extent the growth cycle chronology of zarnowitz and boschan 1977

the role of ports in the making of major cities self agglomeration and hub effect this paper proposes an evolutionary model of spatial economic development in which agglomeration economies and the hub effect of transport nodes interplay in the making of major cities the model explains the irreversibility of spatial economic development such as the continuing prosperity of port cities even after their initial advantage of water access had become irrelevant it is also shown that in order to decentralize industries from the core region to a periphery region a temporary protection of industries in the periphery by worsening the transport connection with the core for a short period of time may be desirable

anti williamson a marxian critique of new institutional economics new institutional economics explains capitalist institutions by means of neoclassical tools this method consists of introducing non market institutions as solutions to market failures the explicit or implicit assumption is that in the beginning there were markets in this paper we criticise this conception inherited from neoclassical economics by focusing on williamson s theory first we discuss williamson s speculative method which idealises the market and presents it as natural and universal we then suggest that williamson s categories his method and conception are themselves products of bourgeois ideology in this sense we conclude williamson himself is ultimately an institution of capitalism

informed trading and portfolio returns we solve a multi period model of strategic trading with long lived information in multiple assets with correlated innovations in fundamental values market makers in each asset can only condition their price functions on trading in the that asset but not on trading in the other asset using daily non public data from the new york stock exchange we test the model s predictions on the lead lag relations of institutional order ows and returns within portfolios we flnd support for the model prediction of positive autocorrelations in portfolio returns as well as the predictions for how informed order ow positively predicts future returns and future informed order ow as the model predicts we flnd these relations strengthen for portfolios formed from assets with higher correlation of fundamental values

opening the ivory tower to business university industry linkages and the development of knowledge intensive clusters in asian cities summary in a globalizing environment in which the competitiveness of firms and the economic prosperity of major urban centers hinges on technological dynamism and the capacity to nurture innovation universities have an increasingly vital role beyond the traditional role of teaching leading universities in middle and lower middle income countries are finding that the need to enlarge or build research capabilities in basic research and also in technology development is being urged upon them by governments and by firms this collection of papers charts progress to date indicates where it might be heading and assesses the pace and direction of change

private information trading volume and stock return variances new evidence is provided on the determinants of stock return variances first when the tokyo stock exchange is open on saturday the weekend variance increases weekly variance is unaffected however despite an increase in weekly volume second the listing of u s stocks in tokyo substantially increases the number of trading hours but tokyo volume is negligible for these u s stocks and their 24 hour variance is unaffected the overall results are consistent with the predictions of private information based rational trading models but inconsistent with both the irrational trading noise and public information hypotheses

spatial evolution of population and industry in the united states what features characterize the evolution of the u s urban system in this past century to what extent has the 500 percent increase in national urban population during 1900 1990 been accommodated by growth in numbers versus sizes of cities given the radical changes in the u s economic geography has the relative size distribution of city sizes changed significantly with say strong increases in urban concentration and primacy a popular notion as urbanization slowed after world war ii did fluctuations in city sizes and upward downward mobility of cities dampen as an arthur scale economy framework would predict brian arthur 1990 finally what natural geographic features of a city promote growth how important are climate location neighbor cities and the like an interrelated set of questions concerns the agglomeration and mobility of industrial activity within the set of cities are industries that are subject to greater scale economies both more agglomerated and less mobile for industries that are not subject to scale economies why does agglomeration occur central to answering these questions is measuring the nature and extent of scale economies this paper reports results on these two sets of issues using population census data for 1900 1990 and manufacturers census data for 1963 1992 for a selection of machinery and high tech industries

insecurity and the pattern of trade an empirical investigation corruption and imperfect contract enforcement dramatically reduce international trade this paper estimates the reduction using a structural model of import demand in which insecurity acts as a hidden tax on trade we find that inadequate institutions constrain trade as much as tariffs do we also find that omission of indices of institutional quality biases the estimates of typical gravity models obscuring a negative relationship between per capita income and the share of total expenditure devoted to traded goods finally we argue that cross country variation in the effectiveness of institutions and the consequent variation in the prices of traded goods offer a simple explanation for the stylized fact that high income capital abundant countries trade disproportionately with each other

public choice and the economic analysis of anarchy a survey public choice economists began studying anarchy in the 1970s since then the amount of research on anarchy has burgeoned this article surveys the important public choice contributions to the economics of anarchy following early public choice economists many economists are researching how individuals interact without government from non public interested explanations of the creation of government to historical studies of internalizing externalities under anarchy public choice scholars are arriving at a more realistic perspective of human interaction with and without government although the economics of politics receives more attention the economics of anarchy is an important area of research in public choice

introduction a symposium on the predatory state economists have adopted two broad perspectives on the state contractual i e provider of public goods and services and predatory coercive and extractive by a predatory state we mean a state that promotes the private interests of dominant groups within the state such as politicians the army and bureaucrats or influential private groups with strong lobbying powers neo institutional economists support an extended version of the contractual perspective in which the state is not simply a benevolent dictator but may itself be composed of predators however it considers predation as only a means to promote protection by contrast a predatory vision of the state argues that while protection and predation are two faces of the same coin a predatory state protects only to promote its predation on the private sector this symposium explores how a predatory approach to the state can shed light on all types of state from liberal democratic to authoritarian and failed ones both in the past and present

high frequency trading and comovement in financial markets abstract using the staggered entry of chi x in 12 european equity markets as a source of exogenous variation in high frequency trading hft we find that hft causes significant increases in comovement in returns and in liquidity about one third of the increase in return comovement is due to faster diffusion of market wide information we attribute the remaining two thirds to correlated trading strategies of hfts the increase in liquidity comovement is consistent with hft liquidity providers being better able to monitor other stocks and adjust their liquidity provision accordingly our findings suggest a channel by which hft impacts the cost of capital

anarchy and autarky endogenous predation as a barrier to trade this article presents a general equilibrium two country ricardian trade model with endogenous transactions costs that arise from individual utility maximizing allocation of labor to production and piracy in the absence of institutions for risk sharing and coordination of defense autarky obtains over most of the parameter space when both trade and predation are supported in equilibrium terms of trade effects can make security immiserizing in that case paradoxically predation creates trade

the political economy of truth in advertising regulation during the progressive era abstract this paper explores the origins and effects of truth in advertising regulation during the progressive era was advertising regulation adopted in response to rent seeking on the part of firms that sought to limit the availability of advertising as a competitive device or was advertising regulation desired because it furnished a mechanism through which firms could improve the credibility of advertising we find the available evidence to be more consistent with the latter hypothesis

the voracity effect abstract we analyze an economy that lacks a strong legal political institutional infrastructure and is populated by multiple powerful groups powerful groups dynamically interact via a fiscal process that effectively allows open access to the aggregate capital stock in equilibrium this leads to slow economic growth and a voracity effect by which a shock such as a terms of trade windfall perversely generates a more than proportionate increase in fiscal redistribution and reduces growth we also show that a dilution in the concentration of power leads to faster growth and a less procyclical response to shocks jel f43 o10 o23 o40

tipping and the dynamics of segregation schelling dynamic models of segregation journal of mathematical sociology 1 1971 143 186 showed that extreme segregation can arise from social interactions in white preferences once the minority share in a neighborhood exceeds a tipping point all the whites leave we use regression discontinuity methods and census tract data from 1970 through 2000 to test for discontinuities in the dynamics of neighborhood racial composition we find strong evidence that white population flows exhibit tipping like behavior in most cities with a distribution of tipping points ranging from 5 to 20 minority share tipping is prevalent both in the suburbs and near existing minority enclaves in contrast to white population flows there is little evidence of nonlinearities in rents or housing prices around the tipping point tipping points are higher in cities where whites have more tolerant racial attitudes

investment analysis and the adjustment of stock prices to common information in this article we are concerned with the effect of the number of investment analysts following a firm on the speed of adjustment of the firm s stock price to new information that has common effects across firms it is found that returns on portfolios of firms that are followed by many analysts tend to lead those of firms that are followed by fewer analysts even when the firms are of approximately the same size many analyst firms also tend to respond more rapidly to market returns than do few analyst firms adjusting for firm size this relation however is nonlinear and the marginal effect of the number of analysts on the speed of price adjustment increases with the number of analysts article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

information and index arbitrage a random cash futures basis is derived in a dynamic multimarket learning game with sequential information shocks and strategic arbitrageurs who trade to exploit gaps in the basis statistical properties of the authors theoretical basis are derived both with and without index arbitrage the authors find that basis volatility a measure of intermarket mispricing may initially increase even as individual prices become more precise and that arbitrage reduces basis volatility the model is also used to analyze regulatory issues such as the possible impact of circuit breakers on the quality of the trading process copyright 1994 by university of chicago press

two bandits or more the case of viking age england the olsonian distinction between roving and stationary bandits outlines the rationale behind the transition from anarchy to the emergence of the predatory state this two bandit model may however be expanded to include more bandit types in the case of viking age england local english kings were unable to monopolize violence and defend their realms against competing viking raiders as the vikings time horizon grew so did the accumulated value of more formal taxation and bandit types evolved in four steps the first step is the olsonian roving bandit who executed viking hit and run attacks and plunders during the second half of the tenth century the second step is the gafol bandit gafol is payment for leaving paid to among others swein forkbeard the third step is the heregeld bandit heregeld is a tax to support an army for hire most notably thorkell the tall s the fourth step is the olsonian stationary bandit i e the strongest military leader among the vikings cnut the great settled down as the new king overall the olsonian two bandit model can be expanded to a four bandit staircase model in which the new gafol and heregeld bandit types explain the steps from anarchy and short run raiding to long run formal taxation in a predatory state

stock prices and volume the authors undertake a comprehensive investigation of price and volume co movement using daily new york stock exchange data from 1928 to 1987 they adjust the data to take into account well known calendar effects and long run trends to describe the process they use a seminonparametric estimate of the joint density of current price change and volume conditional on past price changes and volume four empirical regularities are found 1 positive correlation between conditional volatility and volume 2 large price movements are followed by high volume 3 conditioning on lagged volume substantially attenuates the leverage effect and 4 after conditioning on lagged volume there is a positive risk return relation article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

measuring true stock index value in the presence of infrequent trading based on the beveridge nelson 1981 decomposition of an arima process i present a measure of true stock index value that is not directly observable due to infrequent trading of stocks the technique is illustrated with daily observations of the russell 2000 index this new measure might well prove useful in studies of lead lag relationships between index derivatives and spot market and futures basis measurements

appropriation violent enforcement and transaction costs a critical survey this paper focuses on the extension of transaction costs to appropriative activity and coercive power in the property rights approach it has been argued that including the costs of appropriation and violent enforcement in transaction costs is based on the assumption that coaseian bargaining can be extended to any institutional scenario i e voluntary as well as coercive exchange however voluntary transactions cannot capture the logic of coercive power this means that the assumption of an efficient political market is not valid and that the political coase theorem lacks the logical consistency to provide a cornerstone for political theory

zipf s law for cities an explanation zipf s law is a very tight constraint on the class of admissible models of local growth it says that for most countries the size distribution of cities strikingly fits a power law the number of cities with populations greater than s is proportional to 1 s suppose that at least in the upper tail all cities follow some proportional growth process this appears to be verified empirically this automatically leads their distribution to converge to zipf s law

2 the institutional structure of production 1 prize lecture to the memory of alfred nobel december 9 1991 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

transactions volume and volatility we show that the positive volatility volume relation documented by numerous researchers actually reflects the positive relation between volatility and the number of transactions thus it is the occurrence of transactions per se and not their size that generates volatility trade size has no information beyond that contained in the frequency of transactions our results suggest that theoretical research needs to entertain scenarios in which 1 both the frequency and size of trades are endogenously determined yet 2 the size of trades has no information content beyond that contained in the number of transactions article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

the rise and decline of nations economic growth stagflation and social rigidities the years since world war ii have seen rapid shifts in the relative positions of different countries and regions leading political economist mancur olson offers a new and compelling theory to explain these shifts in fortune and then tests his theory against evidence from many periods of history and many parts of the world

explaining the postwar suburbanization of population in the united states the role of income abstract data from the public use sample of the 1950 census reveal a significant positive effect of household income on the probability of a suburban residence slightly less than half of population suburbanization between 1950 and 1980 can be attributed to rising household incomes

the structure of a contract and the theory of a non exclusive resource the process of arriving at a useful concept of analysis is not only slow and painful but also may go astray and attain nothing useful someone begins with one example or observation followed by a theory which is intuitively plausible a theoretical term associated with a vague concept is coined examples of a seemingly different type emerge which call for another theory the process goes on as examples and theories continue to accumulate the different categories under the same heading of analysis serve only to confuse and each associated theory becomes ad hoc such has been the fate of the concept of externality a more useful approach i think is via contractual conditions the example chosen for illustration is marine fisheries where the fishing right is taken

efficient redistribution through commodity markets efficiency in redistribution is measured in terms of deadweight loss generated per dollar of economic surplus transferred between consumers and producers of a commodity by means of market intervention the implications of supply and demand elasticities for efficiency in redistribution are examined with special attention to the comparison of production control and deficiency payment programs the results may be used to aid in the evaluation of commodity programs and as a basis for consideration of the hypothesis that observed policies are efficient given the political power of interest groups

seasonalities in nyse bid ask spreads and stock returns in january using end of month bid ask spreads for 540 nyse stocks over the period 1982 1987 we document a seasonal pattern in which both relative and absolute spreads decline from the end of december to the end of the following january cross sectional regressions do not however provide evidence of a significant correlation between changes in spreads at the turn of the year and january stock returns either there is no cause and effect relation between the coincidental seasonals in bid ask spreads and january returns for nyse stocks or the data are too noisy to reveal any relation bid ask spreads hatve played and continue to play an important role in explanations of the january effect in stock returns for example roll 1983 argues persuasively that high january returns are the result of tax loss selling pressure that occurs throughout the year which is released right after the beginning of the new tax year once the selling pressure is released stocks rise in price which results in high january returns however these predictable excess january returns cannot be exploited fully by arbitrageurs because of round trip transactions costs in the form of the bid ask spread this inhibitor to arbitrage is especially great for small or low priced stocks where historically high january returns have been most pronounced stoll and whaley 1983 take a different tack they do not focus on january returns per se but argue that the excess returns on small stocks are a result of higher proportional bid ask spreads in low priced stocks in their view the bid ask spread itself is the cause of the higher returns on small stocks that is because of the higher proportional cost of transacting in small stocks investors demand a higher rate of return in response keim 1983 and schultz 1983 point out that small stock excess returns are concentrated in january and a seasonal in stock returns cannot be explained by the bid ask spread unless there is a seasonal in the bid ask spread as well schultz 1983 compares bid ask spreads in december with those in june plus round trip commissions for a sample of 40 small capitalization new york stock exchange nyse stocks and finds no signifi

globalization and the skilled city abstract the location of economic activity both across and within countries has undergone dramatic shifts over the last five decades three key trends stand out first cross country inequality has declined as many developing countries have grown rapidly second economic geography within countries has instead grown more unequal in both the developed and the developing world third within country spatial disparities have grown mainly because of the disproportionate success of skilled cities in this paper i develop a model that jointly explains these patterns as a consequence of deepening international economic integration my model explains the faster population and output growth of skilled cities as well as their tendency to increase their initial skill advantage consistent with the evidence my theory predicts a non monotonic path of urban growth in developed countries the model predicts a future shift in worldwide urban hierarchies as some developing world cities overtake unskilled cities in industrialized countries along global supply chains

law or economics w hen aaron director and edward levi launched the journal of law and economics in 1958 director suggested the title law or economics this alternative title certainly described the world more accurately at that time the traditional attitude of each discipline toward the other had been one of indifference only gradually has that attitude been replaced by a mixture of cooperation and hostility the first systematic application in america of economics to law was the use of price theory to explain economic phenomena involved in the antitrust cases director made creative use of price theory to explain phenomena such as tie in sales and patent licensing and assisted younger colleagues such as john mcgee and lester telser in their respective studies of predatory competition and resale price maintenance in such applications professional economic analysis was replacing the amateur economics of the lawyer lawyers did not welcome this development the national committee for the study of the antitrust laws was the scene of a deep schism between the fifty three lawyers and the eight economists 2 these numbers probably represented the belief that 13 percent of antitrust policy is economics the remainder law at one point the lawyers attempted to exclude the economists completely from the formulation of the report the division was not simply one between angels and legally trained devils consider the question of price discrimination economists insisted that price discrimination could persist only under noncompetitive conditions under full competition rivals would undermine any attempt to sell part of the supply at a higher price the lawyers argued to the contrary

a positive theory of the predatory state while the distinction between public and private goods is essential in developing a normative theory of non predatory states the focus of this article is on a positive theory of predatory states since the predatory relationship between the state and its subjects depends on the power of the state to grab or to appropriate coercively and the subject s ability to escape or hide the boundaries of the state are decided by the nature of the assets that can be taken more or less easily accordingly i will introduce a new distinction between captive and fugitive assets that positively captures the frontiers of a state space the us railroading in the nineteenth century provides an illustration regarding the explanatory power of an asset appropriating perspective of the state compared to a public goods approach

theory and estimation in the economics of housing demand the main purpose of this paper is to review recent theoretical and empirical developments in the economics of housing demand in particular we ask what is known concerning the permanent income elasticity of housing demand vis a vis the current or measured income elasticity what is known concerning price elasticities what is the appropriate functional form for housing demand equations what is the role of demographic variables what is known concerning dynamic aspects of housing demand what appear to be the major sources of bias in existing estimates of demand equations

an empirical analysis of stock and bond market liquidity this article explores cross market liquidity dynamics by estimating a vector autoregressive model for liquidity bid ask spread and depth returns volatility and order flow in the stock and treasury bond markets innovations to stock and bond market liquidity and volatility are significantly correlated implying that common factors drive liquidity and volatility in these markets volatility shocks are informative in predicting shifts in liquidity during crisis periods monetary expansions are associated with increased liquidity moreover money flows to government bond funds forecast bond market liquidity the results establish a link between macro liquidity or money flows and micro or transactions liquidity a number of important theorems in finance rely on the ability of investors to trade any amount of a security without affecting the price however there exist several frictions 1 such as trading costs short sale restrictions and circuit breakers that impact price formation the influence of market imperfections on security pricing has long been recognized liquidity in particular has attracted a lot of attention from traders regulators

a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence this paper presents a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence political equilibrium depends on the efficiency of each group in producing pressure the effect of additional pressure on their influence the number of persons in different groups and the deadweight cost of taxes and subsidies an increase in deadweight costs discourages pressure by subsidized groups and encourages pressure by taxpayers this analysis unifies the view that governments correct market failures with the view that they favor the politically powerful both are produced by the competition for political favors

trade size order imbalance and the volatility volume relation abstract this paper examines the roles of the number of trades size of trades and order imbalance buyer versus seller initiated trades in explaining the volatility volume relation for a sample of nyse and nasdaq stocks our results reconfirm the significance of the size of trades beyond that of the number of trades in the volatility volume relation on both markets after controlling for the return impact of order imbalance the volatility volume relation becomes much weaker for nyse stocks the order imbalance in large trade size categories affects the return more than in smaller size categories for nasdaq stocks the largest return impact comes from the order imbalance in maximum sized small order execution system soes trades

a theory of price control price or rent control is but one of many forms of legislative action which interfere with private contracting in the market place to delimit the scope of my analysis i shall use the term price control to refer only to any set of regulations which satisfies the following three conditions first the control must fix the price or income terms of private contracts this categorically excludes any laws which regulate the distribution of income among the contracting parties on a share or percentage basis 2 second the control must involve no appropriation of proceeds to or from the government taxation and subsidization are thus excluded finally the fixing of price must not be associated with direct government sales purchases or manipulation of resources so as to maintain the regulated price 3 by this stipulation price support is also excluded even on such terms legal regulations to control price are still many and varied to evaluate our understanding of the class of phenomena which we seek to explain it is essential that we discover implications refutable by facts by this criterion the available body of economic theory pertaining to price control is deficient indeed the massive literature on the subject offers few such implications 4 an alternative approach to analyzing the observable effects of price control is presented here

a tale of three schools insights on autocorrelations of short horizon stock returns this article reexamines the autocorrelation patterns of short horizon stock returns we document empirical results which imply that these autocorrelations have been overstated in the existing literature based on several new insights we provide support for a market efficiency based explanation of the evidence our analysis suggests that institutional factors are the most likely source of the autocorrelation patterns

rational bandits plunder public goods and the vikings the paper applies and extendsinsights from mancur olson s study of statemaking to the vikings in a world ofroving bandits a sub optimal provision ofpublic goods exists most notably ofsecurity roving banditry leads toover plundering and zero profits for theplunderers which makes stationary banditryprofitable the most efficient banditsmonopolize violence begin to tax andprovide some amounts of public goods inorder to stimulate economic growth theanalysis demonstrates how the vikings activities and settlements are consistentwith such an explanation with the dynamicsof the process being reflected in thevariation in the number of raids and theamount of wealth extracted

multimarket trading and market liquidity when a security trades at multiple locations simultaneously an informed trader has several avenues in which to exploit his private information the greater the proportion of liquidity trading by large traders who can split their trades across markets the larger is the correlation between volume in different markets and the smaller is the informativeness of prices we show that one of the markets emerges as the dominant location for trading in that security when informed traders can use their information for more than one trading period the timely release of price information by market makers at one location adversely affects the profits informed traders expect to make subsequently at other locations market makers competing to offer the lowest cost of trading at their location consequently deter informed trading be voluntarily making the price information public and by cracking down on insider trading article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

urban diversity and economic growth at the risk of some simplification it is possible to identify four periods of intense study of cities by economists each of these has led to an increased understanding of the economics of urban areas and the unique role played by cities in the modem economy the first of these periods occurred in the decade after world war i only about ten years after the truck revolutionized the transport of goods within urban areas this period included the first systematic empirical analysis of the forces affecting the location of firms and households within cities robert murray haig 1926 and a number of other microeconomists at columbia analyzed the spatial pattems of manufacturing activity in lower manhattan and in the rest of new york city haig jmd his colleagues devoted considerable attention to where things belong in an urban area p 402 providing the first systematic economic analysis of urban spatial structure for example they analyzed the garment industry concluding that it was destined by nature to disperse north of 14th street and predicting that it would follow the estabhshed spatial pattem of the cooperage barrelmaking industry standardization in size and quality of barrels had meant that identical barrels could be made throughout the new york metropolitan area even in new jersey and the introduction of the truck meant that they could be transported cheaply throughout the region and exported the second of these periods though not in chronological order began in the mid 1960s it formalized many of the insights about location incentives within urban areas which had been uncovered a half century before mixed them with the logic of heinrich von thunen s 1826 ancient theories about agricultural crops and land values and applied them to the hotisehold sector the works of william alonso 1964

restricted coasean bargaining we investigate the efficiency of coasean bargaining when restrictions are placed on the set of feasible bargaining outcomes when property rights are costly to defend appropriate we find bargaining restrictions may be pareto superior to unconstrainedvoluntary exchange under cost uncertainty over the harmful activity we show an efficient configuration of restrictions must balance the potential reduction in appropriation costs with the possibility of allocatively inefficient bargaining restrictions for an all pay auction we find conditions where precluding bargaining is always ex ante preferable to unrestricted bargaining for cases where the restrictions are contested we show conditions for the continuing existence of welfare improvements

industry information diffusion and the lead lag effect in stock returns i argue that the slow diffusion of industry information is a leading cause of the lead lag effect in stock returns i find that the lead lag effect between big firms and small firms is predominantly an intra industry phenomenon moreover this effect is driven by sluggish adjustment to negative information and is robust to alternative determinants of the lead lag effect small less competitive and neglected industries experience a more pronounced lead lag effect the lead lag effect is related to the post announcement drift of small firms following the earnings releases of big firms within the industry

asymmetric information and stock return cross autocorrelations abstract using an asset pricing model under asymmetric information we show that asymmetric lead lag patterns in stock returns cannot be solely explained by information asymmetry additional frictions are necessary to produce asymmetry in return cross autocorrelations

integrating social conflict into economic theory the generalisation of coasian theorem to the power relationship amounts to depicting conflict as a bargaining process between conflictual parties that are simultaneously both partners and adversaries this perspective leads to different models of rational conflicts i e a threat of conflict without any real clash an alternative approach is developed by different models inspired by the public choice school which build upon the logic of coercive power within the framework of a self interested behaviour the integration of social conflicts in a narrowly defined individual cost benefit theoretical framework has resulted in reducing social conflict to real private but not social conflict in other words economic theory has considered social protesters either as potential or actual looters but rarely as a group of people struggling for a common cause integration of social conflict into economic theory will require i abandoning the ubiquitous market model when describing conflictual relationships ii accepting the logic of force or coercive power as a starting point and iii expanding the idea of interest to include encompassing including class interest

determinants of urban sprawl in france an analysis using a hierarchical bayes approach on panel data this paper studies the determinants of urban sprawl in france using panel datasets for the four largest metropolitan areas paris lyon marseille lille over the period 1985 98 a measure of urban sprawl is proposed at municipality level due to the huge heterogeneity of the panels it seems difficult to make the fundamental homogeneity assumption underlying pooled models thus random coefficient models under heteroscedasticity of the disturbances are estimated for each metropolitan area using a hierarchical bayes approach based on the markov chain monte carlo simulation method it is found that urban sprawl is positively related to the income growth of the tax payers fiscal households for the period of rapid growth in the late 1980s at the opposite extreme the income effects are negative for non tax payers during the recession income effects are significant neither for tax payers nor for non tax payers fiscal households and are significantly positive for tax payers and negative for non tax paye

public policies pressure groups and dead weight costs abstract this paper presents a model of competition among special interest groups for political influence each active group exerts pressure to affect its taxes and subsidies where activities of different groups are related by the equality between total tax collections and total tax subsidies the dead weight costs and benefits of taxes and subsidies play a major role in our model an increase in the dead weight cost of taxation encourages pressure by taxpayers while an increase in the dead weight costs of subsidies discourages pressure by recipients various applications of the analysis are discussed