patterns of co authorship among economics departments in the usa given the steady increase in co authored papers in economics journals this paper reports a study of the patterns of co authorship between us universities and colleges a majority of institutions produce more co authored than single authored papers contacts with researchers from the same institution are still an important source of co authored papers even though slightly decreasing in frequency the determinants of co authorship outside the own institution are tested in a gravity model and it is found that distance and other geographical variables do not matter however the quality of co authors institutions measured by rankings of institutions has a significant impact on the number of co authored papers in top economics journals

non monotonic effects of market concentration on prices for residential solar photovoltaics in the united states abstract emerging renewable energy markets may become more concentrated over time as the most efficient firms accumulate market share the effects of this market concentration on prices are tested using a rich dataset of residential solar photovoltaic pv systems in the united states a novel hypothesis is explored that the effects of market concentration may be non monotonic prices may decline in market concentration due to efficiency gains associated with returns to scale but increase in concentration in already concentrated markets due to increasing market power the results of an econometric model provide evidence to support the non monotonic hypothesis however the data suggest that the relationship between prices and firm scale is nuanced and that both large and small scale pv installers may wield efficiency advantages

capital markets and urban unemployment in this paper we investigate conditions under which reductions in distortions in one market improve national welfare despite the presence of distortions in another market the specific distortions we study are a differential between capital rentals and a rigid urban wage we also introduce a diagrammatic technique which may find use in the analysis of other problems

differential efficiency market structure and price a persistent question in industrial economics is the underpinning of the link between market concentration and price how much of the link can be attributed to market power and how much to market efficiency this paper develops a theoretical model to address that question applied to the us portland cement industry the model indicates that both impacts matter in relative terms however the market power effect is twice as large as the efficiency effect an implication for merger policy is that the beneficial efficiency effects of mergers may not be obtained without the detrimental market power effects as well

shadow pricing with suboptimal policy rules abstract this paper aims to clarify different views on the validity of the little mirrlees border price rule for project evaluation in a context where the government chooses its controls suboptimally in a systematic fashion the rule is shown to be valid quite generally for small public sector projects when the government s response restores market clearing in nontradeables and foreign exchange it can be invalid in contexts of a non market clearing or b private sector projects that generate profits distributed to households in the latter case special treatment of profit effects is required along the lines described by little and mirrlees 1974

efficiency versus collusion a reformulation of the weiss test the weiss test has been used to discriminate between the efficiency and collusion hypotheses using a conventional oligopoly model we show that the test is valid for the former hypothesis but not the latter contrary to recent emperical studies we find that a negative coefficient on concentration in profitability equations does not refute the collusion hypothesis in fact this finding supports the hypothesis if the sample is dominated by small firms

diversification multi market contact and profitability this paper analyses the relationships between diversification multi market contact and industry profitability it focuses on the link between diversification and multi market contact to show that when diversification establishes or increases the extent to which firms meet in more than one market the effect of such multi market contact is to increase the possibility that collusion emerges as an evolutionary stable strategy as a result multi market contact may increase the potential for tacit collusion and so lead to higher profitability the effects of diversification and multi market contact on the price cost margin and the rate of return to capital are estimated using a specially constructed new database for uk manufacturing industry in 1979 this database provides information on the diversification and multi market contact of 418 firms across 134 manufacturing industries thus linking firm and industry level data the results show a clear positive effect of multi market contact on industry profitability

mutual forbearance under experimental conditions since corwin edwards first raised it 30 years ago 4 the question whether conglomerate mergers and diversification will affect competition within markets has remained unanswered diversification or conglomeration has no direct impact on entry conditions or market shares or concentration ratios aside from claims for advantages from size per se and not from conglomeration itself the most promising theoretical rationale to explain potential anticompetitive effects has been the mutual forbearance or spheres of influence theory by mutual forbearance we mean the possible tendency for firms meeting in more than one market to account for rivals reactions across market boundaries by adopting less competitive price and output strategies possibly because real world oligopolists have a large set of decision variables available to act on price output capacity advertising research and development etc the effects of interrelationships among firms such as mutual forbearance have been difficult to determine by subjecting industrial data to statistical testing on the other hand in a controlled laboratory setting the validity of particular behavioral assumptions can be examined with some precision sherman has discussed results of previous oligopoly experiments 19 which generally have supported cournot noncooperative solutions rather than cooperative collusive ones and plott has surveyed experiments related to antitrust and industrial organization issues 17 under various information and

market structure and import share a regional market analysis in this paper we analyze the relationship between domestic market structure and cement importation into the united states we do this by examining the impact of concentration technology scale costs and demand on imports into twenty independent united states regional cement markets for a number of years by looking at only one industry as opposed to importation across several diverse industries we hope to remove inter industry effects that may mask the relationship between import share and selected structural characteristics the use of time series data allows us to examine import response to variations in demand over the business cycle this paper is divided into six sections the next describes the united states portland cement industry including its geographically segmented nature production methods demand conditions and incentives for importation section iii contains a model that relates import shares to market structure the data to estimate this model are discussed in section iv section v contains

an economics journals ranking that takes into account the number of pages and co authors in this article i examine whether the academics reward policy must correlate positively with the published number of articles per co author number of pages and journals reputation this is accomplished by estimating a nonlinear model with a panel data from 168 economics journals covered in the isi web of knowledge database 58 825 articles the data reinforces the conjecture that published article value is slightly increasing with the number of co authors and is proportional to the number of pages the data also suggests that there are four distinct groups related to journal quality that i name a b b and b

multiple market contact between savings and loans note when firms diversify into new product or geographic markets via entry or merger they may encounter firms with whom they are already competing an important question for study is whether multiple market contact between firms affects their behavior although most traditional theory assumes that behavior of firms in a market is determined by factors in that market alone edwards 1955 advanced the mutual forbearance or linked oligopoly hypothesis starting from the premise that dominant firms in a market are likely to meet one another in other markets edwards hypothesized that a multimarket firm may not take aggressive actions against a competitor in one market if it fears retaliatory actions by that competitor in another market the crux of the hypothesis is that as the number of contact points between dominant firms of a given market increases the less competitive that market will be regardless of the market s level of concentration although edwards suggested that multimarket contact might reduce competition others including solomon 1970 who studied geographic banking markets and scott 1982 who investigated the diversification of manufacturing firms across different lines of business recognized that contact might increase competition neither edwards solomon nor scott presented a formal model however game theoretic models have been constructed that can be used to study the effects of diversification investigators of the chain store paradox e g kreps and wilson 1982 have shown that in a very simple environment rational strategies in one market cannot be influenced by behavior in a second indepen

technical progress terms of trade and welfare under variable returns to scale the implications of variable returns to scale vrs have been extensively studied by trade theorists e g batra 1968 jones 1968 kemp and negishi 1970 and eaton and panagariya 1979 it is however notable that virtually no efforts have been made to examine the welfare implications of growth for an open economy in the presence of vrs the only exception is a recent study by eaton and panagariya 1982 they derived sufficient conditions for growth rising either from factor accumulation or technical progress to improve the welfare of a small country characterized by vrs 1 the purpose of this paper is to analyse the welfare implications of economic growth identified specifically with hicks neutral technical progress for a small as well as a large country in the presence of vrs we obtain several alternative sufficient conditions for growth to be welfare increasing in addition the effects of growth on the terms of trade in the case of a large country as well as the effect of technical progress in both countries on the terms of trade are examined

an analysis of rural urban migration and protection in this paper a harris todaro migration model is developed with the urban manufacturing sector supplying a crucial input for the rural sector capital is region specific but flows freely between two urban sectors final goods are traded and have exogenously fixed prices if this economy imposes a tariff on the import competing manufacturing sector employment might go down even if the protected sector is labour intensive the paper describes how intersectoral linkages can play a significant role in determining the employment effects of a tariff summary in fre excerpt

multimarket contact among diversified oligopolists multimarket contact appears to be necessary for effective oligopolistic consensus in a concentrated industry when the industry s firms are diversified evidently without multimarket contact coordination breaks down because the diversified sellers have different costs and demands and hence would not independently choose the same price and because price cuts are less easily detected and matched the evidence suggests that bain s seminal observation of the nexus among profits concentration and barriers resulted because of the multimarket contact of the firms in his sample

the profitability concentration relation market power or efficiency industrial economists have been studying the relationship between profitability and concentration using cross industry samples for many years now however as sometimes happens once it appeared that some consensus had been achieved with few exceptions market concentration and industry profitability are positively correlated peltzman i977 p 229 people began to question the interpretation of those results in particular demsetz e g i973 i974 and others suggested that rather than concentration market power leading to higher prices and profits the causal direction in fact ran from greater efficiency to both higher profits and incidentally to higher concentration our purpose here is to subject these conflicting hypotheses to cross industry empirical test using u k data in order to do this we first develop a model which is sufficiently general to allow for both alternative explanations of a positive concentration profitability correlation in the light of this model we then examine the implications for the within industry relation between market share and firm level profitability more specifically we explore demsetz s claim that the empirical form of this relationship should signal which of the alternative hypotheses is consistent with the between industry profitability concentration correlation our model suggests that in certain special circumstances this claim is partly justified in that it should be possible to assess the relative strengths of the market power and efficiency effects from the within industry relation more generally however factors such as product differentiation and scale economies may seriously impair the information content of the relation with at least a strong suspicion that the estimates will tend to exaggerate the evidence in favour of the efficiency hypothesis in the event our results tend to confirm that for most industries the within industry data offer little conclusive support for either hypothesis but for a not insignificant minority of industries the evidence suggests some support for the view that both efficiency and market power are at work simultaneously our model is detailed in section ii and estimated on u k data in section iii after which we offer a few comments in section iv first however we drovide a backcloth to the later analysis

corporate environmental citizenship variation in developing countries an institutional framework this study focuses on why some companies in developing countries go beyond environmental regulations when implementing their corporate environmental social responsibilities or citizenship behavior drawing mainly upon the new institutional theory this study develops a conceptual framework to explain three institutional factors companies market orientations industrial characteristics and corporate identities accordingly we suggest that companies from developing countries that are oriented to markets in developed countries operate in highly concentrated industries and have missionary identities adopt corporate environmental citizenship behavior by going beyond environmental regulations the study also discusses the theoretical policy and managerial implications of the conceptual framework

variable returns to scale urban unemployment and welfare the proposition that free trade is superior to no trade has a classical ancestry adam smith and ricardo were amongst the first proponents of free trade samuelson 26 proved and it is held by economists today that free trade is the optimal policy in the presence of standard paretoconditions it is also generally agreed amongst economists that lower trade intervention is superior to higher trade intervention given competitive conditions in a small country these propositions do not hold however in the presence of factor market imperfections such as wage differentials in a small country and therefore production or wage subsidies improves social welfare the two models which are generally used to investigate the positive as well as normative aspects of trade theory in the presence of unemployment are the uniform real minimum wage model which is based on the assumption of general rigidity of real wage in one or two sectors of production and the sector specific minimum wage model which focuses on the phenomenon of rural urban migration in the face of large scale urban unemployment these two models are commonly utilized by trade theorists to analyze trade and unemployment specifically studies by haberler 13 johnson 16 batra and seth 3 findlay 12 and brecher 6 7 investigate the consequences of rigid factor prices for a small country whereas the normative as well as positive aspects of sector specific unemployment have been explored by harris and todaro 15 bhagwati and srinivasan 4 5 and more recently by batra and naqvi 2 das 10 and kahn 19 it has been correctly observed that the introduction of an exogenously specified real minimum wage among other things generates unorthodox results concerning unemployment and gains from trade a large body of research has also been concerned with the welfare implications of different commercial policies in the context of variable returns to scale kemp and negishi 20 have pointed out the beneficial effects of trade in the presence of variable returns to scale production subsidy and consumption taxes eaton and panagariya 11 have analyzed the question of gains from trade in the presence of variable returns to scale and in the context of pareto welfare criterion whereas choi and yu 8 have examined the welfare implications of tariffs and consumption taxes as well as the welfare rankings of these policies under variable returns to scale while panagariya and succar 25 have modified the necessary and sufficient conditions for stability under increasing returns to scale in urban sector

factor intensities and factor substitution in general equilibrium abstract this article examines how factor intensity rankings between industries and the economy wide asymmetry in the degree of factor substitution combine to influence the manner in which changes in relative commodity prices affect the factoral distribution of income the reciprocal influence of factor endowment changes on the composition of outputs is also discussed the analysis is undertaken in a general three factor two commodity framework the minimal sized model that allows both influences to affect factor prices and admits of the possibility of complementarity between factors factors which are good substitutes find their returns behave somewhat similarly when commodity prices change while factors which are complements experience strongly asymmetrical fortunes a crucial role is played by a comparison of the share of the middle factor in each sector

multimarket contact and pricing evidence from the u s cement industry abstract we empirically examine the effect of multimarket contact on pricing in the u s cement industry a model of price and quantity formation is estimated for a panel of 25 regional cement markets over 16 years the results indicate that the divergence of price from marginal cost in a particular market is directly related to the extent of multimarket contact among firms in that market

capital markets urban unemployment and land abstract this paper shows that the remarkable result by khan and naqvi that a reduction in the capital rental differential always improves welfare despite the presence of a rigid urban wage can be obtained only for the 2 2 harris todaro model in an extended harris todaro framework incorporating a third specific factor a decrease in a distortion may not necessarily be welfare improving

urban development excessive entry of firms and wage inequality in developing countries this paper examines the short and long term effects of urbanisation via favourable urban development policies on income distribution and social welfare for a developing country in which the urban manufacturing sector is characterised by imperfect competition and free entry urbanisation shifts rural workers to the highly productive urban sector while causing production in urban firms to expand because of scale economies however urbanisation may worsen wage inequality between skilled and unskilled labour in the short term in the long term urbanisation can attract new firms to the urban sector and favourable urban development policies may result in excessive entry of firms which can amplify wage inequality in the economy this entry amplifying effect is confirmed empirically especially for low and lower middle income countries if the entry effect is not considered the impact of urbanisation on wage inequality could be understated by 13 for low and lower middle income countries

some simple results on the gains from trade from growth and from public production abstract a simple compact but general revealed preference type of argument is used to derive results on the gains from trade from terms of trade changes and from exogenous resource growth the approach extends to the welfare evaluation of public sector production the relation between the sufficiency conditions for welfare improvement derived from this approach and the necessary and sufficient conditions derived in an alternative approach are briefly discussed most of the argument is conducted in the context of a representative individual economy though it is shown to extend in an essentially unchanged way to cases where redistribution is an issue

a synthesis of the heckscher ohlin and the neoclassical models of international trade a comment abstract batra and casas 1976 have asserted that in the two sector three factor neoclassical model an increase in the supply of one factor at constant commodity prices will increase the output of the commodity using the expanding factor relatively intensively and thereby reduce the output of the other commodity the present note points out that there is a case against their assertion

multimarket contact and collusive behavior traditional analyses of industrial behavior typically link the exercise of market power in an industry to internalfeatures such as demand conditions concentration and barriers to entry nevertheless some economists have remained concerned that external factors such as contact across markets may also play a significant role in determining the level of competitiveness in any particular industry in this article we examine the effect of multimarket contact on the degree of cooperation that firms can sustain in settings of repeated competition we isolate conditions under which multimarket contact facilitates collusion and show that these collusive gains are achieved through modes of behavior that have been identified in previous empirical studies of multimarketfirms

mergers in the gb electricity market effects on retail charges the opening up of the uk residential electricity sector in 1999 prompted several studies of the impact this had on both the level and structuring of retail charges and on incumbent players market power drawing on observations of regional tariffs for the month of january 2004 this article supports previous conclusions based on simulated retail charges looking at the response of real tariffs to distribution and transmission costs customer density and the length of low voltage underground circuit we also investigate whether vertically integrated suppliers have a particular effect on charges ceteris paribus the effect of cost drivers and supplier related factors

urban unemployment and the gains from trade a welfare ranking of alternative commercial policies is constructed for the mobile capital harris todaro economy it is sh own that despite the presence of unemployment most noninterventioni st policies suggested by the competitive model of gains from trade ca rry over to the mobile capital harris todaro economy yet in contradi ction to the competitive model it is shown that all forms of trade i ntervention are not detrimental to welfare only those that reduce th e volume of trade are the export promotion policies so copiously fol lowed by developing countries are vindicated but their import substi tution policies are shown to be without justification copyright 1987 by the review of economic studies limited

market structure and price cost margins in a paper that has become a standard reference in the structure conductperformance approach to industrial economics cowling and waterson 1976 developed a theoretical rationale for expecting industry profitability to be positively correlated with the level of concentration their model based on a simple algebraic description of oligopoly behaviour has been interpreted as providing a justification for the common empirical practice of cross industry regression analysis of price cost margins in terms of concentration levels in the present paper we show that on further examination this model implies a joint determination of margins and concentration this provides some interesting comparative static results of relevance to inter industry differences in concentration levels equally however it leads to various cautionary insights concerning the meaning of price cost margin versus concentration regressions

a note on the stability of the harris todaro model with capital mobility the present note derives the exact stability condition for the harris todaro model with intersectoral capital mobility where land is explicitly included as a third scarce factor in agriculture while the previous study by neary states the difficulty of deriving a clear cut result in such a case this note demonstrates that if capital and land are never technologically substitutes in the agriculture production neary s condition that the urban sector is more capital abundant than the rural sector becomes a sufficient condition for local stability in an important article in this journal neary 1981 considered the stability of the harris todaro model with intersectoral capital mobility among other things neary showed that when relative commodity prices are fixed and capital and labour are subject to constant returns to scale in agriculture an unspecialized equilibrium is dynamically stable if and only if the urban sector is capital abundant relative to the rural sector however in the original work by harris and todaro 1970 the fixed availability of land is included in the agriculture production function hence strictly speaking the stability condition quoted above is not for the original harris todaro model with intersectoral capital mobility on this point neary concluded that the introduction of a third scarcefactor land in agriculture greatly complicates the analysis and makes it impossible to derive simple and clear cut results the present note argues that a definite result can be derived if the normality property of factors of production which was utilized by rader 1968 and suzuki 1985 is assumed

growth and welfare in a small open economy the literature on trade and growth provides several examples in which factor augmentation or technical progress can reduce the welfare of an open economy the most famous example of such immiserizing growth is bhagwati s 1958 demonstration that growth that expands the export industry can reduce welfare by causing the terms of trade to deteriorate more recently examples have been provided in which growth due to either factor expansion or technical progress in the presence of domestic distortions can be immiserizing even in a small open economy johnson 1967 for example shows that technical progress in the import competing industry or growth of the factor used intensively in that industry can reduce welfare if the industry is protected by a tariff similarly bhagwati 1969 shows that the presence of factor market distortions also introduces the possibility of immiserizing growth he concludes more generally that growth may be immiserizing in the presence of any of several types of distortions while the possibility of immiserizing growth in the presence of distortions has been recognized little has been said about conditions under which growth is necessarily non beneficial or non harmful the present paper derives sufficient conditions for growth in the form of either factor augmentation or technical progress not to immiserize a small open economy characterized by variable returns to scale vrs production and consumption taxes tariffs and factor market distortions moreover in each case we provide an explicit condition for the effect of growth on welfare when growth takes the form of an infinitesimal increase in a factor supply or improvement in technology 1 our analysis departs from previous treatments of immiserizing growth by considering growth in an m factor n 1 commodity context with non traded goods rather than in the standard two factor two commodity model 2 this generalization allows us to consider for example the welfare effect of growth in the presence of tariffs when not all imports are affected in the same direction 3 we do however provide some additional results for the 2 x 2 case section i sets forth the general model that we use throughout our analysis here we show that under constant returns to scale crs in production and in the absence of commodity or factor market distortions growth cannot immiserize a small open economy while this result is not entirely new the proof provides a useful benchmark for our subsequent analysis section ii introduces vrs in production and considers their implications for the effect of growth on welfare a discussion of these results for the two commodity one factor case follows in section iii here we examine the relationship between factor growth or technical progress and the composition of output in section iv we return to the mr factor n 1 commodity model to analyse the implications of taxes for the relationship between growth and welfare

measuring market power and cost efficiency effects of industrial concentration in this paper i show how appelbaum s framework for testing price taking behavior in a single industry can be formally extended to consider concentration explicitly in so doing i separate the market power effect of concentration from its cost efficiency effect data from the us beef packing industry are used to illustrate an empirical application of the model the findings support oligopsonistic market power and slaughter cost efficiency in the industry however the cost efficiency effect outweighs the market power effect

a micro econometric model of capital utilization and retirement the case of the u s cement industry the paper presents a micro econometric model of capital utilization and retirement estimates of a firm s discrete decision problem with regard to an existing piece of capital whether to operate hold idle or retire it are obtained in the context of the u s cement industry by solving a discrete choice stochastic dynamic programming model the estimates are then used to simulate the effects of product and input price changes and changes in the size and age of a cement kiln on a firm s propensity to operate hold idle and retire a kiln

trade in goods and trade in tasks an integrating framework abstract we introduce a simple but flexible analytical framework in which both trade in goods and trade in tasks arise we use this framework to provide versions of the gains from trade and the famous four ho theorems heckscher ohlin factor price equalisation stolper samuelson and rybczynski that apply to this environment we extend our framework to accommodate monopolistic competition and two way offshoring and to integrate theoretical results of the early offshoring literature

tariffs foreign capital and immiserizing growth with urban unemployment and specific factors of production abstract in this note we show that a recent observation of brecher alejandro as regards tariff induced capital inflows essentially extends to a setting with urban unemployment three factors of production and a variety of labor market conditions in the urban sector

sales at risk a test of the mutual forbearance theory of conglomerate behavior in seeking to understand the implications of the large amount of diversification and conglomeration that has occurred in the united states since the mid 1960s some economists have revived the mutual forbearance hypothesis first presented by edwards 1955 several papers have attempted to formalize or test this hypothesis which states that multimarket contacts mmcs among firms have the potential for facilitating collusion in one or more of the markets where these contacts occur using 1976 data from the federal trade commission s line of business study an earlier paper feinberg 1982 developed a framework for evaluating mmcs and inthis paper tests the mutual forbearance theory of conglomerate behavior at both company and industry levels using 1976 data from the federal trade commission s line of business program this theory states that companies meeting rivals in more than one market will be able to facilitate collusion in one or all of those markets at the company level the evidence supports the theory showing salesat risk a measure of the importance of multimarket contacts to increase price cost margins in the moderate range of concentration where collusion is feasible but difficult to achieve without mutual forbearance the industry level results are weaker casting some doubt on the hypothesis associate professor of economics pennsylvania state university this paper was begun while i was a consultant to the line of business program at the federal trade commission the manager of the line of business program has certified that he has reviewed and approved the disclosure avoidance procedures used by the staff of the line of business program to insure that the data included in this paper do not identify individual company line of business data views expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of the federal trade commission i would like to thank william long george pascoe david ravenscraft melvin reder and an anonymous referee for their help on this project 1 these studies often refer to terms other than mutual forbearance e g spheres of influence extended interdependence they include adams 1974 reynolds 1976 heggestad and rhoades 1978 areeda and turner 1979 strickland 1980 feinberg 1982 1984 scott 1982 and feinberg and sherman 1985

trends in co authorship in economics since 1985 it has been often noted mcdowell and melvin 1983 barnett et al 1988 piette and ross 1992 sutter and kocher 2004 that the share of co authored papers in economics has been increasing steadily the purpose of this study is to investigate some of the theories as to why co authorship has been increasing in the economics profession using data on the publication records of faculty at 129 us colleges and universities that offer doctoral degrees in economics poisson and logit regression models are estimated to explain co authorship results indicate that the likelihood of co authorship is greater for papers that combine quantitative analysis with another field and for papers published in higher quality journals further co authorship appears to differ in the many subfields of economics with the field of economic history and history of thought journal of economic literature jel categories n and b to be the least likely to co author and the fields of financial economics jel category g and agricu

on the harris todaro model with intersectoral capital mobility n b professor neary was based at trinity college dublin when this article was first published the full text of the article is not available in ora at this time citation neary j p 1981 on the harris todaro model with intersectoral capital mobility economica 48 191 219 234

urban unemployment and non immiserizing growth abstract one purpose of this paper is to show that in the harris todaro economy economic expansion can not be immiserizing another purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of economic expansion for urban unemployment as well as sectoral outputs for the case of non neutral technical change finally it is shown that a damaging property of the harris todaro model that capital accumulation causes unemployment to rise whereas labor growth causes it to fall is at least partially rectified by the incorporation of land as a scarce factor in the agricultural sector

factor content functions and the theory of international trade this paper introduces the concepts of direct and indirect factor trade utility functions and uses them to derive marshallian and hicksian factor content functions which express the quantities of factors of production embodied in net imports as functions of the exogenous variables facing the economy the properties of these functions are discussed and they are used to derive a number of new results in particular it is shown that in certain circumstances the existence of gains from trade is sufficient for the heckscher ohlin theorem to hold in its factor content form

multimarket contact competition and pricing in banking abstract in this paper we assess the impact of multimarket contact of banks on their market power by means of a simultaneous equation model in which the divergence of price from marginal cost is a function of multimarket linkages the model is estimated using aggregate data from the italian regions for the years 1997 2009 our results show that multimarket contact is positively and significantly correlated to the market power index and is also connected to both home and non home market concentration the evidence is robust to changes in model specification and multimarket contact measures and supports the idea that firms which have a greater amount of contact are more likely to collude

purposive diversification as a motive for merger abstract conglomerate mergers can increase the symmetry of diversified competitors operations theory and evidence about such symmetry show that the classic horizontal merger issue efficiency loss because of increased monopoly power versus efficiency gain because of reduced costs is the antitrust economics issue in conglomerate mergers even when there is no concern about the loss of potential competition

living by the golden rule multimarket contact in the u s airline industry this paper examines empirically the effects of multimarket contact on pricing in the u s airline industry the analysis of the time series and cross sectional variability of airline fares in the 1000 largest domestic city pair routes reveals the presence of statistically significant and quantitatively important multimarket effects fares are higher in city pair markets served by carriers with extensive interroute contacts these findings are consistent with the claims of industry experts that airlines live by the golden rule i e that they refrain from initiating aggressive pricing actions in a given route for fear of what their competitors might do in other jointly contested routes during his testimony mr steven b elkins senior director of marketing systems development for northwest airlines cited an example in which northwest lowered fares on night flights that were flying with empty seats in a number of routes from minneapolis and upper midwest cities to various west coast cities he said that continental airlines swiftly responded by cutting prices in important northwest markets mr elkins s memo advises northwest pricing analysts we will live by the golden rule in his testimony he explained that the golden rule in that context was that i did not want my pricing analyst initiating actions in another carrier s market like chicago for fear of what that other carrier might do to retaliate wall street journal october 9 1990 p b1

partial identification and mergers this paper discusses policy choice under ambiguity in the context of merger simulation we do so by incorporating the uncertainty about post merger conduct into a simple merger simulation model we isolate the problem of uncertainty regarding post merger conduct by working with a simple conduct parameters model in the spirit of bresnahan 1982 and lau 1982 we then apply manski s 2011 analysis and discuss policy choice under the maxmin minimax regret and expected utility criteria

possibility or impossibility of paradoxes in the small country harris todaro framework a unifying analysis abstract in this paper we argue that the harris todaro ht framework sometimes satisfies an envelope property which makes it work like a full employment heckscher ohlin samuelson hos model then the ht structure produces very similar results as one gets in the standard hos framework differences arise because the envelope condition may break down we show how several celebrated results in the ht structure can have this reinterpretation