cointegration tests of the fisher hypothesis with variable trends in the world real interest rate after seventy years the fisher hypothesis has proven to be one of the most durable and influential theories in economics yet after years of debate and testing the empirical accuracy of the proposition remains in question the fisher hypothesis simply states that a one point increase in inflation leads to a one point increase in the nominal interest rate leaving real interest rates unchanged this relationship does not rule out the possibility of other variables influencing the real interest rate or variable trends in the real interest rate arising from sources other than inflation this paper merges the literature on real interest rate parity with tests of the fisher hypothesis to control for variable trends in the real interest rate

estimation of consumer demand with stock out based substitution an application to vending machine products the occurrence of temporary stock outs at retail is common in frequently purchased product categories available empirical evidence suggests that when faced with stock outs consumers are often willing to buy substitute items an important implication of this consumer behavior is that observed sales of an item no longer provide a good measure of its core demand rate sales of items that stock out are right censored while sales of other items are inflated because of substitutions knowledge of the true demand rates and substitution rates is important for the retailer for a variety of category management decisions such as the ideal assortment to carry how much to stock of each item and how often to replenish the stock the estimated substitution rates can also be used to infer patterns of competition between items in the category in this paper we propose methods to estimate demand rates and substitution rates in such contexts we develop a model of customer arrivals and choice between goods that explicitly allows for possible product substitution and lost sales when a customer faces a stock out the model is developed in the context of retail vending an industry that accounts for a sizable part of the retail sales of many consumer products we consider the information set available from two kinds of inventory tracking systems in the best case scenario of a perpetual inventory system in which times of stock out occurrence and cumulative sales of all goods up to these times are observed we derive maximum likelihood estimates mles of the demand parameters and show that they are especially simple and intuitive however state of the art inventory systems in retail vend ing provide only periodic data i e data in which times of stock out occurrence are unobserved or missing for these data we show how the expectation maximization em algorithm can be employed to obtain the mles of the demand parameters by treating the stock out times as missing data we show an application of the model to daily sales and stocking data pooled across multiple beverage vending machines in a midwestern u s city the vending machines in the application carry identical assortments of six brands since the number of parameters to be estimated is too large given the available data we discuss possible restrictions of the consumer choice model to accomplish the estimation our results indicate that demand rates estimated naively by using observed sales rates are biased even for items that have very few occurrences of stock outs we also find significant differences among the substitution rates of the six brands the methods proposed in our paper can be modified to apply to many nonvending retail settings in which consumer choices are observed not their preferences and choices are constrained because of unavailability of items in the choice set one such context is in store grocery retailing where similar issues of information availability arise in this context an important issue that would need to be dealt with is changes in the retail environment caused by retail promotions

testing the efficiency of the canadian u s exchange market under the assumption of no risk premium the efficiency of the canadian u s exchange market for the current float is examined more extensively than previously semi strong form tests which admit the lagged spot rate as a predictor are considered in addition to the standard weak form test these stronger tests reject the joint null hypothesis of an efficient exchange market and no risk premium for the period ending in october 1976 although not for the entire period for almost every year the current spot rate provided a better forecast of the future spot rate than did the current forward rate there is now an extensive empirical literature on testing the efficiency of various foreign exchange markets see 16 for a survey yet almost all of these tests are weak form tests or tests of the bias of the forward exchange rate as a predictor of the future spot rate such tests in the canadian u s exchange market can be found in the work of porter 20 eastman 5 kaserman 10 kohihagen 11 cornell 3 and levich 14 for the canadian float of the 1950s porter 20 and kaserman 10 found that one could not reject the unbiasedness of the forward rate eastman 5 and kohlhagen 11 rejected the unbiasedness of the forward rate for the floating period although not for the subsequent fixed period but their use of overlapping contracts means that their standard errors are biased cornell 3 and levich 14 found that in terms of the root meansquared error criterion the lagged spot rate and the lagged forward rate predicted the current spot rate equally well for more recent periods this paper examines the efficiency of the canadian u s exchange market for the current float july 1970 to december 1978 in a more extensive way than it has been previously examined from the weak form test the paper proceeds to two semi strong form tests which admit the lagged spot rate as a possible predictor throughout the paper various subperiods are considered in addition to the period as a whole

the speculative efficiency hypothesis the hypothesis that forward prices are the best unbiased forecast of future spot prices is often presented in the economic and financial analysis of futures markets this paper considers the hypothesis independently of its implications for rational expectations or market efficiency and in order to stress this fact the term speculative efficiency is used to characterize the state envisaged under the hypothesis if a market is subject to efficient speculation the supply of speculative funds is infinitely elastic at the forward price that is equal to the expected future spot price the expected future spot price is a market price determined as the solution to the underlying rational expectations macroeconomic model although the paper is primarily concerned with testing this hypothesis in the foreign exchange market the methodology introduced in the paper is of general application to all futures markets this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the collapse of purchasing power parities during the 1970 s one of the striking facts concerning the relationship beiveen prices and exchange rates during the 1970 s has been the dismal performance of the predictions of the simple versions of the purchasing power parity doctrine ppp that doctrine in its absolute version states that the equilibrium exchange rate between domestic and foreign currencies equals the ratio of domestic to foreign price levels the relative version of the doctrine relates equilibrium changes in exchange rates to changes in the ratio of domestic to foreign prices during the 1970 s short run changes in exchange rates bore little relationship to short run differentials in national inflation rates and frequently divergences from purchasing power parities have been cumulative this paper reviews and analyzes the empirical record of exchange rates and prices during the 1970 s and the analysis is based on the experience of the dollar pound the dollar frecch franc and the dollar dm exchange rates section 2 presents the evidence on ppp during the 1970 s and contrasts it with the evidence from the 1920 s a period during which the doctrine held up reasonably well this analysis is relevant for assessing whether the flexible exchange rate system was successful in providing national economies with an added degree of insulation from foreign shocks and whether it provided policymakers with an added instrument for the conduct of macroeconomic policy the evidence regarding devia tions from purchasing power parities is also relevant for determining whether there is a case for managed float section 3 attempts to explain what went wrong with

a two stage disaggregate attribute choice model a two stage disaggregate attribute choice model is proposed and empirically implemented the first stage of the model is attribute processing to screen the number of alternatives down to a lesser number the second stage is brand alternative processing which considers the attributes simultaneously while allowing for tradeoffs among the attributes this two stage approach is then applied to the same real world data set as two single stage disaggregate models logit and maximum likelihood hierarchical mlh which are state of the art models representing the alternative and attribute processing approaches respectively the predictive accuracy of the two stage approach compares favorably to the single stage models in addition it seems to offer diagnostic information that can provide managerial insights not found in the output of the single stage model

a nested logit model of space and water heat system choice this paper estimates a nested logit model for space heat and water heat choice using data from the 1980 pacific northwest energy survey pnw the estimated structure involves six alternative space heat systems and three alternative water heat fuel types operating and capital costs are predicted for each residence using an energy thermal model to relax the independence of irrelevant alternatives assumption we employ a family of nested logit models we illustrate the two step estimation method and use a lagrange multiplier test for nested logit structure finally we use the estimated models to forecast the market shares of alternative space heat systems under an assumed scenario for the course of relative fuel prices

the choice theory approach to market research this paper surveys economic choice theory stressing developments that permit use of data from psychometric and conjoint experiments to produce market demand forecasts alternatives to the widely used multinomial logit model are summarized and a new method for estimating multinomial probits is described an integration of choice models with attitudinal scaling and perceptual mapping within a latent variable system is described estimation of such systems under either random effects or fixed effects descriptions of heterogeneity across individuals is discussed issues in the use of choice models to describe responses from conjoint experiments are presented new regression diagnostic tests for the consistency of multinomial logit representations are discussed

antecedents and performance implications of channel integration in foreign markets this study enhances our understanding of channel integration in foreign markets on two fronts first the eclectic approach to foreign entry mode proposed by hill hwang and kim 1990 and kim and hwang 1992 is used to examine transaction specific organizational capability and strategic factors that influence channel choices in foreign markets empirical results based on survey of u s firms support the combined relevance of these factors in predicting the degree of channel integration second the study empirically examines the performance consequences of channel integration the results suggest that although the degree of channel integration does not have a direct influence on channel performance a contingency model based on the fit between the contextual factors and the actual channel choice is significantly related to performance in foreign markets

a note on exchange rate expectations and nominal interest differentials a test of the fisher hypothesis this note tests the hypothesis that nominal interest differentials between similar assets denominated in different currencies can be explained entirely by the expected change in the exchange rate over the holding period this proposition often called the fisher open hypothesis or the hypothesis of perfect asset substitutability has been a major component of recent theories of exchange rate determination and has important implications for monetary policy 1 the fisher hypothesis differs from the covered interest parity theorem enunciated by keynes 11 while covered interest parity equates the nominal interest differential between financial centers to a known premium or discount on forward foreign exchange and is thus in principle riskless fisher parity involves risk in an essential way the two conditions are equivalent only when forward exchange rates equal expected future spot rates recent theoretical work for example that of grauer litzenberger and stehle 8 kouri 12 and frankel 6 shows that this need not be the case when market participants are risk averse thus while covered interest parity must always hold exactly in an informationally efficient asset market with no transactions costs fisher parity need not nominal interest differentials may reflect risk premia in addition to expected exchange rate movements 2 it should be emphasized at the outset that the tests conducted in this paper are really joint tests of the fisher hypothesis and a weak form of foreign exchange market informational efficiency levich 14 has argued that tests of market efficiency are always joint tests involving some hypothesized structure of normal equilibrium returns below we assume informational efficiency and instead test fisher s hypothesized arbitrage condition that nominal interest differentials equal expected percentage changes in exchange rates

exit and inefficiency the effects of ownership type this study uses data on hospital closures to examine the relation between exit and inefficiency in an industry where for profit not for profit and government firms coexist the likelihood of hospital exit over the period 1986 91 is estimated as a function of hospital relative inefficiency ownership type and other factors where hospital relative inefficiency is measured using residuals from estimation of a stochastic frontier cost function we find that less efficient hospitals were more likely to exit when ownership was for profit or not for profit but that relative inefficiency did not have a significant effect on the probability of exit for government hospitals

are hospitals seasonally inefficient evidence from washington state efficiency measurement has been one of the most extensively explored areas of health services research over the past two decades despite this attention few studies have examined whether a provider s efficiency varies on a monthly quarterly or other sub annual basis this article presents an empirical study that looks for evidence of seasonal inefficiency using a quarterly panel of general acute care hospitals from washington state we find that hospital efficiency does vary over time however the nature of this dynamic inefficiency depends on the type of efficiency being measured our results suggest that technical and cost efficiency vary by quarter allocative and scale efficiency also vary on a quarterly basis but only if the data are jointly disaggregated by quarter and another firm specific factor such as size or operating status thus future research corporate decisions and government policies designed to improve the efficiency of hospital care need to account for seasonal trends in hospi

money bonds and foreign exchange in the theory of finance capital markets provide securities which allow the ownership of productive assets to be allocated among investors according to their willingness to bear risk in exchange for return and independently of their tastes for the productive services provided by the assets this paper uses the theory of finance to study the role of money as a productive asset and the transformation of money into a portfolio asset true to its purpose the capital market provides securities nominal bonds that allow an allocation of the current services of the money supply according to its current productivity and without regard for its future purchasing power risk and an allocation of the future purchasing power risk of the money supply according to the willingness of investors to bear this risk in exchange for return and without regard for investor needs for the future transactions services of money in open

direct price controls as a source of instability in the interest rate inflation rate relationship abstract we hypothesize that an efficient capital market is more concerned with effective inflation rates which investors experience than official ones which econometricians observe and that direct consumer goods price controls are likely to result in disparity between the two consequently direct price controls are also likely to affect the interest measured inflation rate relationship we ropose a dummy variable approach which enables us to explore empirically the effects of such controls on the interest inflation rate relationship in the context of dwyer s 1981 model using euro rates and inflation rates of the respective countries we explore the impact of the control programmes imposed in the 1970 s by governments of the united states canada and france france

political vs currency premia in international real interest differentials a study of forward rates for 24 countries abstract different approaches to quantifying the degree of capital mobility for a cross section of currencies particularly saving investment correlations and tests of real interest parity have appeared to show a surprisingly low degree of financial integration we use a new data set forward rate data for 24 countries including many small industrialized countries and seven ldcs to decompose the real interest differential into two parts the covered interest differential or political premium and the real forward discount or currency premium the latter in turn can be decomposed into the exchange risk premium and expected real depreciation we find a high degree of capital mobility across political boundaries for most of the g 11 countries plus hong kong and singapore for our sample period of 1982 to 1987 even for most of the other ldcs and smaller industrialized countries for which covered interest parity clearly fails the political premium is not as big a component of the real interest differential as the currency premium france would appear to have higher capital mobility than most by the criterion of real interest differentials but is seen in fact to have low capital mobility by the criterion of covered interest differentials a clear example of the superiority of the latter criterion

measuring hospital efficiency with frontier cost functions this paper uses a stochastic frontier multiproduct cost function to derive hospital specific measures of inefficiency the cost function includes direct measures of illness severity output quality and patient outcomes to reduce the likelihood that the inefficiency estimates are capturing unmeasured differences in hospital outputs models are estimated using data from the aha annual survey medicare hospital cost reports and medpar we explicitly test the assumption of output endogeneity and reject it in this application we conclude that inefficiency accounts for 13 6 percent of total hospital costs this estimate is robust with respect to model specification and approaches to pooling data across distinct groups of hospitals

the influence of involvement on disaggregate attribute choice models the state of the art in applying the various disaggregate choice algorithms is to assume homogeneity of choice process within the population being analyzed this article uses the involvement variable a priori to categorize the sample population into a high involvement segment using a model that assumes a simultaneous or alternative processing approach and a low involvement segment using a model that assumes a hierarchical or an attribute processing approach empirical results indicate increased predictive accuracy and diagnostic information that is more closely related to established consumer behavior theory

choice map inferring a product market map from panel data this paper describes choice map a model that infers a product market map from panel data choice map is a stochastic brand choice model a random utility quantal choice model and a multidimensional scaling procedure choice map combines the parsimony of stochastic choice models the rationale of random utility models and the ability of multidimensional scaling procedures to simultaneously infer both brand positions and consumer preferences from preference choice data choice map assumes that consumers have stationary purchase probabilities for the observational period which makes the model best suited to frequently bought mature product categories neither experimental nor survey data are required traditional mapping methods that scale such data may not yield the same structure for low involvement products as will a procedure like choice map that scales behavioral data choice map s descriptive and predictive validity exceeds that of an alternative stochastic brand choice model the dirichlet multinomial for a test data set

on some international parity conditions an empirical investigation abstract this paper investigates weak semi strong and strong forms of the following international parity conditions a uncovered interest parity b the hypothesis of equal ex ante real interest rates and c ex ante purchasing power parity the main results are as follows using data which roughly cover the 1975 1984 decade we find little evidence in favor of the strong form of the parity conditions under consideration however most test results are consistent with the weak forms finally regarding the semi strong forms the results are mixed

are real interest rates equal across countries an empirical investigation of international parity conditions this paper conducts empirical tests of the equality of real interest rates across countries the empirical evidence strongly rejects the hypothesis of real rate equality and the joint hypotheses of uncovered interest parity and ex ante relative ppp or the unbiasedness of forward rate forecasts and ex ante relative ppp the evidence suggests that it is worth studying open economy macroeconomic models which allow 1 domestic real rates to differ from world rates 2 time varying risk premiums in the forward market or 3 deviations from ex ante relative ppp the relationship of real interest rates across countries is of central importance to our understanding of open economy macroeconomics in some models where there is costless international arbitrage in goods and financial assets real interest rates for comparable securities should be equal across countries this has been a feature of much of the early research in the monetary approach to exchange rates e g frenkel 11 and bilson 2 on the other hand finance theory indicates that risk premia may well differ for comparable securities denominated in different currencies solnick 27 roll and solnick 26 stulz 28 fama and farber 7 hansen and hodrick 17 and dornbusch 6 and more recent theoretical models in the exchange rate literature such as dornbusch 5 frankel 10 and mussa 24 depend on real rates differing between countries in the short run the proposition that real rates are equal across countries is worth studying

technical note simplified estimation procedures for mci models structural transformations of the mci model are presented which make the model easily estimated using dummy variables with widely available regression packages the mci model is empirically shown to provide better predictive power than several other models of similar form but ones which do not produce logically consistent market share estimates

exchange rate dynamics an empirical investigation this paper estimates a reduced form exchange rate equation whose estimates are used to address questions on exchange rate overshooting intermediate run exchange rate dynamics and long run proportionality relationships between relative money supplies and exchange rates based on swiss u s data from the period 1973 79 the major findings are that following a monetary shock there is short run exchange rate overshooting by a factor of about two and that subsequent exchange rate adjustments to a new long run equilibrium take longer than 2 years and exhibit nonmonotonic patterns

a minimum discrimination information estimation of multiattribute market share models multiattribute market share models mmsm using supplier product and buyer attributes as explanatory variables generally use a logit model structure the literature indicates two basic types of approaches for estimating coefficients regression type approaches generally using log share ratios and a nonregression approach which is based on maximum likelihood principles this article discusses a nonregression estimation approach a minimum discrimination information mdi whose formulation differs from mdi procedures previously applied to the marketing literature the mdi formulation enables researchers to estimate a logit model with proportions as the dependent variable and is computationally easy because it uses the same estimators as an mle approach which assumes independence of trials equivalence between mdi and mle estimates under certain conditions are discussed the estimation methods are applied to a real world data set the results indicate the mdi mle method does best in predicting the market shares of the suppliers according to some basic error criteria both at disaggregate and aggregate levels

assessing productivity changes in uk hospitals reflecting technology and input prices in this study malmquist productivity indexes are used to evaluate the performance of acute hospitals in the uk over the period after the introduction of the internal market in the national health service in 1991 the indexes are computed using nonparametric programming known as data envelopment analysis and they are decomposed into multiple component measures to give insights into the trends in hospital performance overall it is found that productivity regressed in the year after the reforms but progressed thereafter so that overall there was a net progress both as far as the inputs and costs are concerned productivity progress is mainly due to overall efficiency progress which in turn is mostly attributed to allocative efficiency improvements technical change resulted in a small reduction in the amount of inputs used but also at higher production costs because of a worsening in the match between input mixes and relative input prices however it is suggested that the gains in productivity are not

international asset pricing with time varying risk premia abstract recent empirical evidence that forward exchange rates are biased predictors of future spot rates can also be interpreted as evidence against the hypothesis of a constant risk premium consequently reconciliation of this evidence with efficient international capital markets requires the existence of time varying risk premia this paper modifies kouri s 1977 asset pricing model to allow time varying exected returns on assets eliminates the assumption of a risk free real asset and derives the characteristics of the risk premia in the forward market as well as the equilibrium yield relationships among the equities and riskless nominal bonds of all countries

domestic saving and international capital movements in the long run and the short run the evidence and analysis in this paper support the earlier findings of feldstein and horioka 1980 that sustained increases in domestic savings rates induce approximately equal increases in domestic rates of investment new estimates for the post opec period 1974 79 imply that each extra dollar of domestic saving increases domestic investment by approximately 85 cents in a sample of 17 oecd countries an explicit analysis of the problems of identification and simultaneous equations bias suggests that the regression estimates are more relevant as a guide to the long run response of international capital flows than to their short run behavior coefficient estimates based on annual variations in savings and investment are subject to potentially severe simultaneous equations bias that is not present when annual observations are averaged over a decade or more and the regression is estimated with a cross country sample of these averages a portfolio model of international capital allocation that is presented in the paper indicates that the short run change in the rate of net foreign investment in response to a sustained increase in domestic saving is likely to be substantially greater than the ultimate steady state response this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

tests of rational expectations and no risk premium in forward exchange markets abstract this paper tests the simple efficiency hypothesis i e that traders have rational expectations and charge no risk premium in the forward exchange market it uses a statistical procedure which is consistent under a large class of heteroscedasticity and a set of data which takes into account the institutional features of the forward exchange market the results show that this procedure leads to stronger rejections of the simple efficiency hypothesis than do procedures using the standard assumption of homoscedasticity

effectiveness of environmental regulations under imperfect enforcement and the firm s avoidance behavior this paper explicitly defines enforcement quality and develops a model by incorporating enforcement quality and the firm s avoidance behavior the results indicate that the effectiveness of environmental regulations is likely to depend upon the level of enforcement quality as well as upon the nature of the firm s avoidance behavior policy instruments may become incompatible under certain circumstances enforcement quality should be properly targeted to enhance functional harmonization between instruments the condition under which emission tax is more effective under imperfect enforcement than under complete enforcement is also identified

flexible exchange rates prices and the role of news lessons from the 1970s recent experience with flexible exchange rate systems has led to renewed interest in the operation of foreign exchange markets as reflected in many recent studies of the principal determinants of exchange rates the 1970s witnessed the dramatic alteration of the international monetary system from a regime of pegged exchange rates which prevailed for about a quarter of a century since the bretton woods conference into a regime of flexible though managed rates as a consequence of the emergence of the new legal and economic system traders national governments and international organisations were confronted with new economic problems choices and instruments during the 1970s ex change rates fluctuated widely and inflation rates accelerated the international monetary system had to accommodate extraordinarily large oil related shocks which affected trade flows in goods and assets huge oil payments had to be recycled uncertainties concerning future developments in international politics reached new heights and the prospects for the world economy got gloomier these developments placed unprecedented pressures on the markets for foreign exchange as well as on other asset markets they were associated with a large slide in the value of the us dollar and resulted in speeding up the creation of new institutions like the european monetary system which provided the formal framework for the management of exchange rates among members

dynamics of real interest differentials an empirical investigation abstract linear dynamic stochastic processes are derived for the ex ente real interest differentials from those followed by the ex post processes under the assumption of rational expectations the technique is used to test the equality of ex ante real rates between u s and a number of oecd countries the evidence against the short run equality of ex ante real rates is overwhelming in the long run the rates are co integrated but not always equal it takes approximately six months for the differentials to converge to their long run values

the term structure of the forward premium abstract most studies of the efficiency of the foreign exchange market focus on a single maturity usually a one month forward exchange rate however one observes that forward contracts of many maturities are simultaneously traded in the foreign exchange market the hypothesis that the foreign exchange market uses all available information has implications for the joint behavior of forward exchange rates of various maturities this paper proposes an equilibrium theory of the term structure of the forward premium the model is tested using data on the german and canadian exchange rates the results indicate that the data are consistent with the theory for germany and inconsistent with the theory for canada

semiparametric versus parametric classification models an application to direct marketing in this paper we are concerned with estimation of a classification model using semiparametric and parametric methods benefits and limitations of semiparametric models in general and of manski s maximum score method in particular are discussed the maximum score method yields consistent estimates under very weak distributional assumptions the maximum score method can very easily be used in situations where it is mare serious to make one kind of classification error than another in this paper we use a so called threshold crossing model to discriminate between credit card holders and nonholders the estimated parameters of the logit model differ significantly from the estimates of maximum score given an loss function maximum score performs better than the logit model

comparing french and us hospital technologies a directional input distance function approach french and us hospital technologies are compared using directional input distance functions the aggregation properties of the directional distance function allow comparison of hospital industry level performance as well as standard firm level performance with regard to productive efficiency in addition the underlying constituents of efficiency in the short run congestion and technical inefficiency and in the long run scale inefficiency are analysed by decomposing the overall measure by virtue of using the directional distance function it is also possible to obtain an estimate of a lower bound on allocative inefficiency it is found that french and us hospitals use quite different technologies long run scale inefficiencies cause most of the french hospitals inefficiency while short run technical inefficiency is the main source of overall productive inefficiency in the us hospitals

purchasing power parity as a theory of international arbitrage in manufactured goods an empirical view of uk us prices in the 1970s this study treats purchasing power parity as a theory of arbitrage and seeks to test for its applicability at a disaggregated level evidence is found to suggest that arbitrage in individual markets cannot be easily aggregated due to different a adjustment periods across industries even at a disaggregated level the evidence does not suggest a long run arbitrage process of the type implied by relative purchasing power parity moreover the length of time which industries take to adjust to changes in foreign prices and the exchange rate is found to be related both to the domestic competitive environment and the extent to which the particular good is traded

an alternative explanation for lower repeat rates after promotion purchases several authors have observed that average repeat rates are lower after a promotion purchase one interpretation of this result is that a media coupon or cents off promotion undermines the consumer

the use of linear logit models in marketing research the author discusses the use of the linear logit model in marketing research a brief review of the linear logit model focuses on model formulation estimation evaluation and inference procedures

behavioural differences among hospitals it is ownership or location by about 1988 the consensus among leading health economists was that no meaningful differences existed among hospitals of differences owernership form and this position was embraced by the antitrust division of the us department of justice but behavioural differences among hospitals of different among hospitals of different owernership has continued to be a matter of both academic and judicial interest recent empirical studies have concluded that real differences do exist while many earlier studies reached the opposite conclusion this contradiction in finding over time as competition intensified is exactly opposite to what expense preference theory would predict we examine this apparent paradox using a very general test of behavioural differences by hospital ownership we find that the omission of location specific variables can lead to biased estimates of ownership effects and that no significant behavioural differences exist among private california hospitals in 1986 90 when this source of o

exchange rate volatility international trade and the value of exporting firms abstract increased exchange rate volatility positively affects the value of exporting firms via the price and volume impacts of exchange rates and also makes an exporting strategy more attractive relative to the direct investment investment in export production capacity could therefore be a positive function of exchange rate volatility firms would also be more willing to sustain losses i e to engage in dumping before they abandon their export markets the effect on the volume and value of trade is ambiguous

a comparison of the predictive validity of procedures for analyzing binary data some approaches for analyzing binary data are briefly described and compared the results of two empirical investigations in the context of assessing consumer preferences and a simulation study yield some interesting findings the article concludes with some directions for future research in this area

econometric methods and purchasing power parity short and long run ppp this paper defines the different versions of the purchasing power parity and establishes the existing relationships between them in the light of econometric techniques monthly and annual data for real exchange rates are studied through a variance ratio test unlike other authors it is found that there is not explosive behaviour in the real exchange rate when monthly data are used besides stationarity is easily accepted using annual data these results allow to reconcile the two main versions of the purchasing power parity and also explain why trade imbalances are persistent but not permanent

how do social networks contribute to wage inequality insights from an agent based analysis based on a closed agent based macroeconomic simulation model eurace unibi this article analyzes whether the density of social networks influences via referrals the residual wage inequality in different skill groups it is shown that an increase in network density leads to a polarization of firms and a concentration of workers with high specific skills at firms with high productivities and wages thereby enlarging within group wage inequality but not between group wage inequality

predictive testing of consumer choice models not subject to independence of irrelevant alternatives the probabilistic modeling of the relationship between objective or perceived characteristics of multiattribute alternatives and consumer choice is receiving increased attention in marketing and ot

payment source and the cost of hospital care evidence from a multiproduct cost function with multiple payers abstract this study investigates the capacity of hospitals to vary the intensity of their services based on patients expected sources of payment while the concept of price discrimination by hospitals based on payer generosity cost shifting has been discussed extensively the notion that hospitals can adjust payer specific marginal costs to reflect differences in reimbursement policies has not been studied in depth to examine this issue this analysis employs a multiproduct cost function with hospital outputs defined as admissions by payment source controlling for the distribution and severity of illness casemix for each payer marginal costs of casemix adjusted discharges are obtained and compared for medicare medicaid private payers and a residual category that includes uncompensated care we find that indeed payer specific marginal costs generally reflect payer generosity

a model of exchange rate dynamics this model treats the exchange rate as an asset price that depends on expectations concerning exogenous real and monetary factors that will affect relative prices and absolute price levels in future periods changes in exchange rates reflect both expected changes in these exogenous factors and changes in expectations occasioned by new information the model explains the random component in exchange rate behavior the source of divergences from purchasing power parity the anticipatory response of exchange rates to future expected disturbances and the causes of exchange rate overshooting

an international comparison of hospital efficiency does institutional environment matter the consensus among many health economists is that no meaningful performance differences exist among for profit and non profit hospitals in the us but this topic has continued to be a matter of academic judicial and public policy interest a similar debate has ensued internationally regarding the potential efficiency gains from privatization of public enterprises in this paper we examine empirical evidence from the public highly regulated norwegian hospital sector and the private highly competitive and unregulated california hospital sector to ascertain whether institutional environment and level of market competition significantly affect the degree of productive efficiency in hospitals we compare and discuss the productive efficiency of four similar sets of hospitals operating in different institutional and competitive environments the four samples are carefully matched in the dimensions of sample size hospital size and average lengths of stay heterogeneity in output definition is used to co

covered interest parity uncovered interest parity and exchange rate dynamics a number of macroeconomic models of open economies under flexible exchange rate assume a strong version of perfect capital mobility which implies that currency speculation commands no risk premium if this assumption is dropped a number of important results no longer obtain first the exchange rate and interest rate cannot be in steady state unless both the government deficit and current account equal zero not simply their sum as would otherwise be the case second even in steady state the domestic interest rate can deviate from the foreign interest rate by an amount which de ends upon relative domestic asset supplies finally introducing risk aversion on the part of speculators can reduce the response on impact of the exchange rate to changes in domestic asset supplies in this sense rational speculators if they are less risk averse than other agents can destabilize exchange markets this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

comment testing the homogeneity of segments for estimating disaggregate choice models comment to gensch d h 1984 targeting the switchable industrial customer marketing sci 3 winter 41 54

assessing the technical and allocative efficiency of hospital operations in greece and its resource allocation implications abstract in this paper we seek to develop a research framework concerning the assessment of the efficiency of public sector hospital operations public hospitals are increasingly under pressure to improve their operations both in terms of resources they use and also in terms of the quantity and quality of their outcomes the assessment of efficiency entails both the notions of technical and allocative efficiency as they yield complementary information about the management effectiveness of individual hospitals technical efficiency has a diagnostic purpose as it yields comparative information about the effectiveness with which individual units convert their input resources into outputs on the other hand allocative efficiency has a planning orientation since the objective of the assessment is to gauge efficiency improvements by means of resource reallocation a linear programming based model is proposed for assessing allocative efficiency in the light of uncertainty about the prices of input factors the empirical part of the paper is based on data from greek public hospitals results and policy implications are discussed based on data from 98 general hospitals based on information from 1992 it was found that significant inefficiencies are present in the operations of greek hospitals that account approximately for 100 mecu in 1992 prices