exchange rate pass through in u s manufacturing industries this paper studies exchange rate pass through in u s manufacturing industries and its cross sectional variation through an adapted dixit stiglitz model of product differentiation the paper predicts that pass through is positively related to the degree of product differentiation and inversely related to the elasticity of marginal cost with respect to output empirical estimates of the pass through elasticities show that pass through is incomplete and varies across industries the degree of pass through is found to be positively correlated to different proxies for product differentiation and negatively to a proxy for the elasticity of marginal cost

exchange rate pass through and dynamic oligopoly an empirical investigation abstract this paper explicitly takes into account the dynamic oligopolistic rivalry among source producers to evaluate the degree of exchange rate pass through using recent time series techniques for the case of imported automobiles in switzerland the results show that prices are strategic complements and that the degree of pass through is lower in the long run than in the short run this is due to the fact that although some rivals match long term price changes others do not inducing the producer who faces a change in exchange rate to absorb a greater proportion of the variation the degrees of pass through are also low with respect to other studies which do not endogenize pricing behavior

what type of finance matters for growth bayesian model averaging evidence this paper examines the effect of finance on long term economic growth using bayesian model averaging to address model uncertainty in cross country growth regressions the literature largely focuses on financial indicators that assess the financial depth of banks and stock markets these indicators are examined jointly with newly developed indicators that assess the stability and efficiency of financial markets once the finance growth regressions are subjected to model uncertainty the results suggest that commonly used indicators of financial development are not robustly related to long term growth however the findings from the global sample indicate that one newly developed indicator the efficiency of financial intermediaries is robustly related to long term growth

china and the relationship between the oil price and the dollar abstract we study cointegration and causality between the real price of oil and the real price of the dollar over the 1974 2004 period our results suggest that a 10 rise in the oil price coincides with a 4 3 appreciation of the dollar in the long run and that the causality runs from oil to the dollar through the development of a theoretical model we then investigate possible reasons why this relationship could be reversed in the future due to the emergence of china as a major player on both the oil and the foreign exchange markets

symmetric pass through of tariffs and exchange rates under imperfect competition an empirical test abstract this paper examines the effect of tariffs and exchange rates on u s prices of japanese cars trucks and motorcycles in particular we test whether the long run pass through of tariffs and exchange rates are identical the symmetry hypothesis we find that this hypothesis is easily accepted in our sample we also find that the pass through relation varies across products ranging from about 0 6 for trucks to unity for motorcycles these coefficients have very different implications for trade policy we explain the results based on demand cost and institutional conditions in each industry

exchange rate pass through into import prices revisited what drives it a large sample of developed and emerging economies is utilized to investigate import exchange rate pass through panel models reveal that various economic aspects of the destination country can explain about one third of the total variation in pass through elasticities and the remaining variation comes largely in the form of unobserved country specific effects inflation exchange rate volatility openness and relative wealth play a clear role as drivers of emerging markets pass through whereas the output gap and protectionism appear influential more generally nonlinearity regarding large versus small changes in the exchange rate is quite pervasive our evidence challenges the widely held view that pass through has been universally falling in developed markets and that it is higher for emerging markets the economic drivers are shown to play a role as out of sample predictors of pass through the findings confirm pricing to market theories and have implications for the optimal conduct of monetary policy

educational policy and labour productivity an output accounting exercise what is the contribution of education to output productivity or their growth economists have tried to answer this question using output accounting or growth accounting by the decomposing of output or its growth into the contributions of various factors including education the approach in this paper is output accounting of which krueger i968 provides an early example using crude aggregate census data on some 20 mostly developing countries krueger posed the question how much do differences in educational endowments lead to differences in per capita income she estimated the effect on per capita income in the united states of assuming not the u s educational distribution but the distribution in each other country the size of this effect xw as then related to the differences in per capita income krueger explained more than half the difference in per capita income by differences in human capital and so concluded that human capital defined more broadly than educational attainment contributed more than all other factors combined another version of the same exercise but using a three factor production function was conducted by fallon and layard i 9 75 with similar data sources but for a different set of countries they found the contribution of their index of human capital to be lower than krueger s estimate and generally lower than that of physical capital output and growth accounting both suffer from well known drawbacks see for instance bowman i980 and nelson i98i first failing to take account of the other determinants of income can bias estimates of the difference in income and productivity attributable to education secondly in simply assuming that the standardised earnings difference between the educated

using evidence of household income diversification to inform study of the rural nonfarm labor market in africa abstract the labor market literature in developing countries has seldom drawn on the studies of rural household income diversification this paper draws on such studies to inform future study of the rural nonfarm labor market in africa the review of evidence provides some surprising departures from traditional images of nonfarm activities of rural households among the most striking is the dominant importance in the majority of case study areas of nonfarm wage labor as compared to self employment of nonfarm sector earnings as compared to farm sector wage earnings and of local nonfarm earnings as compared to migration earnings the most worrying finding was the poor distribution of nonfarm earnings in rural areas despite the importance of these earnings to food security and farm investments this poor distribution implies significant entry barriers and market segmentation it is probable that this will lead over time to an increasingly skewed distribution of land and other assets in rural africa

measurement of monopoly behavior an application to the cigarette industry a simple scheme is proposed to measure monopoly pricing behavior the coefficient of the tax rate term in a price equation identifies the ratio of price to marginal cost no direct measurement of costs is required so a major problem for other empirical studies of monopoly is avoided empirical results for cross section time series data support rejection of atomistic competition but also provide evidence against the operation of an effective cartel in the cigarette industry the model represents an alternative interpretation of related results in a recent paper by barzel application of the methodology to other markets is feasible

price discrimination by u s and german exporters the insensitivity of the u s trade balance to the sharp depreciation of the dollar in the past three years has revived interest in the relationship between exchange rates and the trade balance a central issue in most analyses of the relation between the current account and the exchange rate concerns the price adjustment process the simple integrated competitive market model predicts that local currency prices should change in proportion to the nominal exchange rate for a country too small to influence world prices the relationship between local currency import prices and exchange rates has been referred to as the pass through relationship in the empirical literature in international economics if the proportional relationship between import prices and exchange rates holds pass through is said to be complete accounts of recent u s experience cite the failure of dollar prices of imported goods to rise in proportion to exchange rates i e incomplete pass through as an important factor in explaining the persistence of the trade deficit unfortunately observations on pass through alone provide limited insight into the behavior of markets since incomplete pass through is consistent with at least two fundamentally different paradigms one is the standard competitive model of trade in which the law of one price holds but exchange rate fluctuations are associated with large changes in import demand due to other factors for example if dollar appreciation is correlated with increases in world demand and industry marginal cost is increasing then pass through will be less than complete the other is an imperfectly competitive model in which exporters are capable of price discriminating across destination markets a phenomenon paul krugman 1987 has labeled pricing to market in this model incomplete pass through is typically associated with fluctuations in the markup of price over marginal cost on exports 2 these fluctuations in markups are believed to be countryspecific they do not reflect the behavior of prices to other export destinations both models are plausible explanations of recent u s experience unfortunately it is impossible to distinguish between these competing models using only information on import prices and exchange rates for a single country in order to distinguish between the competing models an empirical analysis of goods prices and exchange rates must be capable of measuring either marginal cost or the markup over marginal cost either of these tasks poses formidable empirical problems much of the empirical literature in industrial organization has been concerned with precisely these issues since markups are an important measure of the competitiveness of industries

persistent trade effects of large exchange rate shocks this paper presents a theoretical basis for the argument that large exchange rate shocks such as the 1980s dollar cycle may have persistent effects on trade flows and the equilibrium exchange rate itself we begin with a partial equilibrium model in which large exchange rate fluctuations lead to entry or exit decisions that are not reversed when the currency returns to its previous level then we develop a simple model of the feedback from hysteresis in trade to the exchange rate itself here we see that a large capital inflow which leads to an initial appreciation can result in a persistent reduction in the exchange rate consistent with trade balance

low inflation pass through and the pricing power of firms abstract recently there has been a significant decline in the degree to which firms pass through changes in costs to prices a decline that is frequently characterized as a reduction in the pricing power of firms the decline appears to be associated with the decline in inflation in many countries the decline has important implications for monetary policy because it affects both forecasts of inflation and the effects of changes in monetary policy on inflation some have argued that the decline in pricing power helped to keep inflation low in the face of apparently strong demand pressures in the united states in the late 1990s this paper puts forth the view that the decline in pass through or pricing power is due to the low inflation environment that has recently been achieved in many countries first a microeconomic model of price setting is used to show that lower pass through is caused by lower perceived persistence of cost changes evidence is then presented showing that inflation is positively correlated with persistence of inflation suggesting that the low inflation itself has caused the low pass through an economy wide model consistent with the micromodel is then presented to illustrate how such changes in pricing power affect output and inflation dynamics in favorable ways but can disappear quickly if monetary policy and expectations change

wages equal productivity fact or fiction using a matched employer employee data set of manufacturing plants in three subsaharan countries i compare the marginal productivity of different categories of workers with the wages they earn in each country i observe approximately 135 firms and an average of 5 5 employees per firm under certain conditions the wage premiums for worker characteristics should equal the productivity benefits associated with them i find that equality holds strongly in zimbabwe the most developed country in the sample but not at all for tanzania the least developed country results for kenya are intermediate differences between wage and productivity premiums are most pronounced for characteristics that are clearly related to human capital such as schooling training experience and tenure moreover where the wage premium differs from the productivity benefit general human capital tends to receive a wage return that exceeds the productivity return and the reverse holds for more specific human capital investments schooling tends to be over rewarded even though most of the productivity benefit comes from job training wages tend to rise with experience even though productivity is mostly increasing in tenure sampling errors nonlinear effects and non wage benefits are rejected as explanation for the gap between wage and productivity effects localized labor markets and imperfect substitutability of different worker types provide a partial explanation department of economics university of toronto 150 st george street toronto on m5s 3g7 canada jovb chass utoronto ca seminar participants at the university of illinois kellogg school of management and catholic university of louvain provided useful suggestions funding by the connaught foundation is gratefully acknowledged

exchange rate pass through at the product level we use a detailed database to investigate exchange rate pass through at the product level for a large number of countries the empirical analysis suggests that pricing behaviours are dichotomous with complete pass through in around 25 of sectors and significant pricing to market in the remaining ones average long run pass through coef ficient is close to 80 this result hides a strong heterogeneity of pass through behaviours across sectors even when composition effects are controlled for average pass through varies across importing countries the econometric analysis shows that pass through tends to be higher in volatile environments in less developed countries in weakly integrated markets jel classification f12 f31 f41

the growth of network computing quality adjusted price changes for network servers in this paper we investigate the evolution of quality adjusted prices for servers motivated by two facts first the productivity acceleration in the us economy since the mid 1990s is closely linked to spread of information technology of which networked computing is a large component second the growth of network computing itself has been fostered by the rapid growth in the quality and quantity of the network server market like pakes 2003 analysis of the pc market we show that our preferred version of the hedonic price index complete hybrid fell much more rapidly than the standard matched model price index the hedonic index fell on average by about 30 per annum compared to 17 p a for the matched model this difference is mainly due to the selection bias in the standard matched model price index due to the exit of obsolete models which would have had the fastest price falls

sex wages and productivity an empirical analysis of israeli firm level data sex discrimination in labor markets may generate a wage gap between men and women that exceeds any gap in marginal productivity we test for this type of discrimination using unique firm level data on manufacturing firms in israel there is a statistically significant negative association between wages and the proportion of a firm s workforce that is female however there is also a statistically significant negative association between marginal productivity and the proportion of females the difference beween the wage and productivity gaps is small relative to wage regression estimates of wage discrimination and is not statistically significant which is most consistent with no discrimination

comments on jointness of growth determinants we consider the measures of jointness proposed by doppelhofer and weeks 2009 and strachan 2009 in the context of variable selection using the general criteria suggested in ley and steel 2007 we identify some shortcomings of these measures which are illustrated with empirically relevant example cases we argue that careful examination of the properties of any jointness measure is critical before using it to inform decisions and favour the use of the measures proposed in ley and steel 2007 copyright c 2009 john wiley sons ltd

markup adjustment and exchange rate fluctuations evidence from panel data on automobile exports abstract this paper uses data on bilateral automobile export prices from the usa germany and japan to gauge the importance of markup adjustment driven by exchange rate movements across several destination markets we find that japanese exports are characterized by a high degree of markup adjustment designed to stabilize the price measured in the buyer s currency there is weak evidence for such behavior on the part of german exporters and no evidence of markup adjustment by us exporters where it exists markup adjustment tends to be highly persistent the dynamic pattern of markup adjustment is consistent with invoicing in the exporter s currency except for exports to the usa and canada

hyteresis in import prices the beachhead effect this paper shows that temporary real exchange rate fluctuations can have persistent hysteretic effects on trade specifically when market entry costs are sunk sufficiently large exchange rate shocks alter domestic market structure and thereby induce hysteresis this simple result has strong implications for exchange rate theory t rade policy and estimation of trade equations empirical evidence su ggests that the recent dollar overvaluation induced hysteresis in u s import prices namely the aggregate pass through equation of exchange rates to import prices shifted in the 1980s the shift s nature and timing is broadly consistent with the hysteresis hypothesis copyright 1988 by american economic association

inflation targeting and exchange rate pass through this paper analyzes how endogenous imperfect exchange rate pass through affects inflation targeting optimal monetary policies in a new keynesian small open economy the paper shows that an inverse relation exists between the pass through and the insulation of the economy from foreign and monetary policy shocks and that imperfect pass through tends to decrease the variability of the terms of trade furthermore with cpi inflation targeting in the short run delayed pass through constrains monetary policy more than incomplete pass through and interest rate smoothing amplifies this effect when the pass through decreases the variability in economic activity tends to rise and the trade off between the stabilization of cpi inflation and output worsens in direct relation to how strictly the central bank is targeting cpi inflation in contrast with domestic inflation targeting optimal monetary policy is not constrained and opposite results occur consequently imperfect pass through favors the choice of domestic to cpi inflation targeting

comment on jointness of growth determinants by gernot doppelhofer and melvyn weeks doppelhofer and weeks 2009 present a statistic designed to indicate the probability that pairs of regressors appear together or individually in a bayesian model averaged linear regression this comment presents an alternative measure that is designed to overcome some of the limitations of doppelhofer and weeks statistic copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

a note on the effect of cost changes on prices in a recent article in this journal sumner 1981 took an ingenious approach to estimating the level of monopoly power in the cigarette industry he noted that differences in marginal costs exist in the industry due to varying levels of state taxes the sales prices established will satisfy the equation p i liq l mr mc where p price and q the elasticity of demand for the product in question if elasticity is a constant observing the change in marginal cost and the change in price enables one to infer the elasticity of demand perceived by the firm elasticity could then be used as a proxy for the firm s market power this technique turns out to be of very limited applicability however because it is extremely sensitive to the functional form assumed for the demand curve consider the general problem of a firm facing constant marginal costs of c in maximizing profits the firm solves

unveiling covariate inclusion structures in economic growth regressions using latent class analysis we propose the use of latent class analysis methods to analyze the covariate inclusion patterns across specifications resulting from bayesian model averaging exercises using dirichlet process clustering we are able to identify and describe dependency structures among variables in terms of inclusion in the specifications that compose the model space we apply the method to two datasets of potential determinants of economic growth clustering the posterior covariate inclusion structure of the model space formed by linear regression models reveals interesting patterns of complementarity and substitutability across economic growth determinants

differences in income elasticities and trends in real exchange rates abstract one might expect that differences in income elasticities in trade and or differences in growth rates among countries would give rise to strong secular trends in real exchange rates for example fast growing countries might need steady depreciation to get the world to accept their growing exports in fact however income elasticities are systematically related to growth rates by the 45 degree rule under which fast growing countries appear to face high income elasticities of demand for their exports while having low income elasticities of import demand the net effect of this relationship between elasticities and growth rates is that secular trends in real exchange rates are much smaller than one might otherwise have expected relative ppp holds fairly well this paper documents the existence of a 45 degree rule and suggests an explanation in terms of increasing returns and product differentiation

rates of return on physical and human capital in africa s manufacturing sector in this paper two sets of issues are addressed using panel data from the manufacturing sector of five african countries first how high are the returns to human relative to physical capital second what is the relative importance of technology and endowments of human and physical capital in determining differences in earnings and productivity across the countries evidence from earnings functions shows that the private returns to both experience and education rise with the level of education private returns rise from 3 per cent at the primary level to 10 per cent at the secondary level and 35 per cent for tertiary evidence from the production function gives lower returns on education than from the earnings function rates of return on physical capital exceed 20 per cent and greatly exceed the average return on human capital data is available on the stocks of human and physical capital across the countries productivity and earnings differentials are shown to be large between cameroon and ghana these differences are due almost entirely to differences in physical not human capital endowments this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

explaining the exchange rate pass through in different prices abstract this paper examines the performance of a variety of new open economy macroeconomic models in explaining the exchange rate pass through in a wide range of prices quantitative versions of different models are used to derive the dynamic response of various prices to an exchange rate shock predicted responses are compared with the evidence based on var models to examine how well different models fit the data the results show that the best fitting model incorporates a number of features highlighted by different strands of the literature sticky prices sticky wages distribution costs and a combination of local lcp and producer currency pricing pcp

market power firm performance and real wage growth in zimbabwean manufacturing abstract this paper uses a two year panel of data on 600 zimbabwean manufacturing workers and the employers to examine several aspects of the labor market response to the reforms introduced in the 1991 structural adjustment program the analysis then uses this evidence to explore a number of hypotheses about the functioning of formal urban labor markets in zimbabwe with particular attention to the issue of rent sharing first as one would expect liberalization of trade did indeed act to shift employment from import competing sectors to export sectors although total manufacturing employment was basically unchanged second real wages in manufacturing fell for most workers third the pattern of wage changes across sectors and firms is consistent with a view of labor markets as noncompetitive the evidence provides support for the idea that a rent sharing process of wage determination rather than one based on efficiency wages or government intervention is an appropriate characterization of this labor market

exchange rate pass through when market share matters the authors investigate the pass through from exchange rates to import prices when firms future demands depend on their current market shares they show that profit maximizing foreign firms may either raise or lower their dollar export prices when the dollar appreciates temporarily i e the pass through may be perverse and that current import prices may be more sensitive to expected future exchange rates than to current exchange rates they present evidence that suggests the behavior of expected future exchange rates may provide a clue to the puzzling recent behavior of u s import prices copyright 1989 by american economic association

exchange rate pass through abstract the resilience of trade balances of the major industrialized economies to changes in their exchange rates has evoked interest in the exchange rate pass through relationship so far there has not been a comprehensive survey of this literature the paper aims to fill this gap in two ways first it pieces together the theoretical literature on exchange rate pass through second it provides a critical survey of the empirical literature on exchange rate pass through emphasis is placed on the data and methodology employed in previous work this is done in order to guide future work in this growing area of research

adjustment costs and pricing to market theory and evidence abstract this paper develops an adjustment cost model of pricing to market the model consists of a monopolist who supplies an identical nondurable good to two foreign markets it is shown that the degree of pricing to market increases with the relative importance of the transitory component in exchange rates customs data from 1978 through 1987 on u s and canadian imports of seven german commodities are used to estimate the model s parameters and test its over identifying restrictions

pricing to market behaviour in european car markets abstract this paper investigates ptm behaviour in european car markets for a period of great interest 1993 98 taking into account the role of invoicing currency the results indicate that local currency price stability is a strong and pervasive phenomenon across products independently of the invoicing currency the paper offers robustness checks tests and arguments that justify the interpretation of this finding at least in part as evidence of ptm it implies the existence of market segmentation and price discrimination despite the completion of the single market programme on 1 january 1993

pricing to market price discrimination or product differentiation we employ a vertical differentiation model to examine the potential bias in pricing to market results when using export unit values aggregating differentiated products our results show that i false evidence of pricing to market is always found when using unit values whether the law of one price holds or not and ii the size of the bias increases with the level of product differentiation our simulation results support those conceptual findings thus some of the positive pricing to market results in the literature could be an artifact of the product heterogeneity embodied in unit values rather than evidence of imperfect competition

jointness of growth determinants reply to comments by rodney strachan eduardo ley and mark f j steel this comment contrasts the jointness statistics proposed by doppelhofer and weeks 2009 with alternatives proposed by strachan 2009 and ley and steel 2007 in contrast to the alternatives our jointness statistic constitutes a formal test for dependence over the joint posterior distribution the essential difference between our proposed measure and the alternatives is that our jointness measures uses the entire joint posterior distribution we discuss differences in jointness as well as inclusion and exclusion margins of the joint posterior distribution and the impact on economic significance using the numerical examples given by strachan 2009 and ley and steel 2009 copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

international dimensions of optimal monetary policy abstract this paper provides a baseline general equilibrium model of optimal monetary policy among interdependent economies with monopolistic firms and nominal rigidities an inward looking policy of domestic price stabilization is not optimal when firms markups are exposed to currency fluctuations such a policy raises exchange rate volatility leading foreign exporters to charge higher prices vis a vis increased uncertainty in the export market as higher import prices reduce the purchasing power of domestic consumers optimal monetary rules trade off a larger domestic output gap against lower consumer prices optimal rules in a world nash equilibrium lead to less exchange rate volatility relative to both inward looking rules and discretionary policies even when the latter do not suffer from any inflationary or deflationary bias gains from international monetary cooperation are related in a non monotonic way to the degree of exchange rate pass through

in which currency should exporters set their prices this paper studies the choice of price setting currency for an exporter faced with the choice of setting price in his own in the importers or a third currency under exchange rate uncertainty we establish that sufficient conditions on demand and cost functions for exchange rate pass through to be less than unity under certainty are also sufficient conditions for price setting in the importer s currency to yield the highest expected profit under exchange rate uncertainty under the same conditions on demand and cost functions setting price in the importer s currency maximizes expected utility when risk aversion and forward currency markets are introduced

jointness of growth determinants this paper introduces a new measure of dependence or jointness among explanatory variables jointness is based on the joint posterior distribution of variables over the model space thereby taking model uncertainty into account by looking beyond marginal measures of variable importance jointness reveals generally unknown forms of dependence positive jointness implies that regressors are complements representing distinct but mutually reinforcing effects negative jointness implies that explanatory variables are substitutes and capture similar underlying effects in a cross country dataset we show that jointness among 67 determinants of growth is important affecting inference and informing economic policy copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

international comparisons of pricing to market behavior this paper measures the degree of price discrimination across export destinations that is associated with exchange rate changes using u s u k german and japanese industry level data given the industries sampled more price discrimination across destinations is observed in the u k german and japanese data for industries that match across source countries however behavior is very similar across source countries furthermore destination specific price adjustment on exports to the united states from germany and japan is similar to price adjustment observed on shipments to other destinations most variation in the data appears to be related to industry copyright 1993 by american economic association

do capital importing countries pay higher prices for their imports of goods abstract we examine the effects that a country s net capital flows have on the border prices that a country pays for its imports of goods using data from 2000 to 2009 for 11 euro area countries we utilize a pricing to market specification to study exporters pricing behavior to the rest of the countries in the sample at the industry level for 900 goods disseminated at the 4 digit standard international trade classification level this allows us to construct a panel dataset which contains observations across exporters importers industries and time we find a strong positive influence of the importing country s net capital inflows on the border prices of its imports of goods this result is robust across different specifications of the underlying model as well to different sample dis aggregations across types of capital flows product categories and exporters

equivalence results for optimal pass through optimal indexing to exchange rates and optimal choice of currency for export pricing firms sometimes write price lists or catalogs for their exports so they set prices for a period of time and do not adjust prices during that interval in response to changes in their environment the firm sets the price either in its own currency or the importer s currency this paper draws a simple link between the choice of currency and the pricing decision of a firm that changes prices in response to all shocks specifically if the latter firm s price has a lower variance in terms of its own currency than the importer s currency then the firm with a price list will set the price in its own currency and otherwise it will set price in the foreign currency this relationship is established by consideration of the firm with a price list as a special case of a firm that indexes its export price to the exchange rate jel f4 f1

why do the free trade gain numbers differ so much the role of industrial organization in general equilibrium a small general equilibrium model calibrated approximately to match the canadian tradeable goods sector is used to examine the implications of a range of assumptions about pricing behaviour and entry barriers for the impact of free trade with the united states it turns out that only a model with an extreme combination of non competitive product market and free entry as well as unexploited scale economies can generate substantial gains from free trade other assumptions modelled include monopolistic competition market share pricing an economist s model and a mainstream industrial organization approach the predicted welfare gains range from zero to more than 7 per cent of gnp pourquoi est ce que les evaluations numeriques des gains derives de l accord de libre echange different tellement le role de l organisation industrielle dans l analyse d equilibre g6neral l auteur utilise un petit modele d equilibre general calibre pour approximer le secteur canadien des biens echangeables avec l exterieur dans son analyse des implications d un ensemble de postulats quant a la tarification et aux barrieres a l entree sur l impact du libre echange avec les etats unis il appert que seul un modele impliquant une combinaison extreme de marches de produit non concurrentiels et d entree libre ainsi que d economies d echelle non exploitees peut engendrer des gains substantiels comme resultat du libre echange on examine aussi d autres postulats concurrence monopolistique tarification pour maintenir une part du marche un modele a saveur economiste et 1 approche standard d organisation industrielle les gains de bien etre qu on predit selon les postulats de base couvrent un eventail de zero a 7 pour cent du pnb

exchange rates and prices the adjustment of relative prices to exchange rate movements is explained in an industrial organization approach given labor costs in the respective currencies exchange rate movements change costs for firms selling in the home market and thus disturb the industry equilibrium the extent of absolute and relative price adjustment is shown to depend on market integration product substitutability the relative number of domestic and foreign firms and the market structure the impact of exchange rates on prices is illustrated in a variety of approaches including the cournot a dixit and j stiglitz 1977 and s salop 1979 models some empirical evidence is offered in support of the theory copyright 1987 by american economic association

exchange rate misalignments in duopoly the case of airbus and boeing we examine the effect of exchange rate misalignments on competition in the market for large commercial aircraft this market is a duopoly where players compete in dollar denominated prices while one of them airbus incurs costs mostly in euros we construct and calibrate a simulation model to investigate how companies adjust their prices to deal with the effects of a temporary misalignment and how this affects profit margins and volumes we also explore the effects on the long run dynamics of competition we conclude that due to the duopolistic nature of the aircraft market airbus will pass only a small part of the exchange rate fluctuations on to customers through higher prices moreover due to features specific to the aircraft industry such as customer switching costs and learning by doing even a temporary departure of the exchange rate from its long run equilibrium level may have permanent effects on the industry

can unobserved land quality explain the inverse productivity relationship abstract an inverse relationship between both farm productivity and labor intensity and farm size is a common empirical finding in developing country agriculture the traditional explanation has been imperfect labor markets recently it has been suggested instead that the inverse relationship is a statistical artifact resulting from omitted land quality using a farm level data set from java i investigate whether omitted variable bias can explain the inverse relationship i show that the inverse relationship and accompanying wage responses are inconsistent with a model of neoclassical farm behavior that ignores omitted variable bias instrumental variables techniques yield parameter estimates in which the inverse relationship is eliminated and the estimated wage elasticities are more in line with economic theory further econometric investigation hints that a model of omitted land quality may be a possible source of the inverse relationship these results emphasize the importance of considering the sources of cross sectional variation in estimating microeconomic relationships