the nature of diversified business groups a research design and two case studies diversified business groups dominate the private sectors of most of the world s economies several of these economies have undergone sudden policy changes that significantly increase domestic competitive intensity the authors demonstrate how the changes in corporate scope that accompany such competitive shocks can be used to weigh the importance of different explanations for the existence of diversified business groups the authors illustrate their reasoning by studying the restructuring of two of india s largest business groups following a comprehensive post 1991 package of policy reforms the case studies also elucidate aspects of the restructuring process that should inform larger sample empirical analyses copyright 1998 by blackwell publishing ltd

temporal aggregation of an estar process some implications for purchasing power parity adjustment nonlinear models of deviations from ppp have recently provided an important theoretically well motivated contribution to the ppp puzzle most of these studies use temporally aggregated data to empirically estimate the nonlinear models as noted by taylor 2001 if the true dgp is nonlinear the temporally aggregated data could exhibit misleading properties regarding the adjustment speeds we examine the effects of different levels of temporal aggregation on estimates of estar models of real exchange rates our monte carlo results show that temporal aggregation does not imply the disappearance of nonlinearity and that adjustment speeds are significantly slower in temporally aggregated data than in the true dgp furthermore the autoregressive structure of some monthly estar estimates found in the literature is suggestive that adjustment speeds are even faster than implied by the monthly estimates

nonlinear dynamics in deviations from the law of one price a broad based empirical study abstract in this paper we test empirically the validity of the law of one price using data for five major bilateral us dollar exchange rates and nine goods sectors during the recent floating exchange rate regime since the early 1970s using threshold autoregressive models we find strong evidence of nonlinear mean reversion in deviations from the law of one price with plausible convergence speeds consistent with theoretical arguments on international goods markets arbitrage under transactions costs and with an emerging strand of empirical literature these results contribute towards forming a consensus view in favor of discrete regime switching in deviations from the law of one price and the presence of differing nonzero transactions costs across a broad range of goods and countries

the tradeoff of the commons under stochastic use abstract we develop a model of scarce renewable resources to study the problem of the commons our model formulation differs from the existing literature in that it assumes the use of the commons to be stochastic in nature one example is microwave spectrum for mobile and wireless communications we investigate three mechanisms of resource allocation free usage the exclusive franchise and a regulated monopoly we show that the welfare tradeoff among these three mechanisms depends on the characteristics of the commons and their usage patterns in particular we find that property rights are not always the best solution we then make four extensions that apply to spectrum allocations

business groups and product variety in trade evidence from south korea taiwan and japan abstract we analyze the impact of market structure on the trade performance of south korea taiwan and japan south korea has many large vertically integrated business groups known as chaebol whereas business groups in taiwan are smaller and more specialized in the production of intermediate inputs we test the hypotheses that a greater presence of business groups leads to less product variety but higher product quality using data on exports from these countries to the united states we find that taiwan tends to export a greater variety of products to the us than korea and this holds particularly for final goods in addition taiwan exports higher quality intermediate inputs whereas korea exports higher quality final goods a comparison with japan is also presented which has greater product variety in its sales to the us than either taiwan or korea due to its larger size

measuring market integration foreign exchange arbitrage and the gold standard 1879 1913 a major question in the literature on the classical gold standard concerns the efficiency of international arbitrage authors have examined efficiency by looking at the spread of the gold points gold point violations or the flow of gold or by tests of various asset market criteria including speculative efficiency and interest arbitrage these studies have suffered from many limitations both methodological and empirical we offer a new methodology for measuring market integration based on nonlinear theoretical models and threshold autoregressions we also compile a new high frequency series of continuous daily data from 1879 to 1913 we can derive reasonable econometric estimates of the implied gold points and price dynamics the changes in these measures over time provide an insight into the evolution of market integration

nonlinear adjustment to purchasing power parity in the post bretton woods era abstract this paper models the dynamics of adjustment to long run purchasing power parity ppp over the post bretton woods period in a nonlinear framework consistent with the presence of frictions in international trade we estimate exponential smooth transition autoregressive estar models of deviations from ppp which are obtained using the johansen cointegration method for both consumer price index cpi and wholesale price index wpi based measures and a broad set of us trading partners in several cases we find clear evidence of a mean reverting dynamic process for sizable deviations from ppp with the equilibrium tendency varying nonlinearly with the magnitude of disequilibrium analysis of impulse response functions also supports a nonlinear dynamic structure but convergence to long run ppp in the post bretton woods era is very slow

firms as portfolios a mean variance analysis of unquoted uk companies this paper adopts a mean variance portfolio framework to model the balance sheet behavior of unquoted companies with respect to choice items such as fixed investment investment in stocks trade credit and borrowing econometric results for a sample of thirty nine u k firms are consistent with many of the restrictions implied by portfolio theory in particular that these balance sheet items are jointly determined copyright 1989 by blackwell publishing ltd

a new analysis of the determinants of the real dollar sterling exchange rate 1871 1994 the high persistence of both ppp deviations and the proxy variables for the equilibrium real rate might create a problem of spurious coefficient significance within recently applied nonlinear models to illustrate we consider the real dollar sterling exchange rate over the period 1871 1994 a nonlinear estar process with a time varying equilibrium seems to parsimoniously fit the data appropriate significance levels are obtained using the wild bootstrap method to adequately capture the conditional heteroskedasticity in the data our results provide further evidence for the nonlinear model and the implied speed of adjustment is found to be substantially faster than previously reported in the literature

the process followed by ppp data on the properties of linearity tests recent research has reported the lack of correct size in stationarity test for ppp deviations within a linear framework however theoretically well motivated nonlinear models such as the estar appear to parsimoniously fit the ppp data and provide an explanation for the ppp puzzle employing monte carlo experiments we analyze the size and power of the nonlinear tests against a variety of nonstationary hypotheses we also fit the estar model to data from high inflation economies our results provide further support for estar specification

spectrum auctions yesterday s heresy today s orthodoxy tomorrow s anachronism taking the next step to open spectrum access abstract the auction paradigm for spectrum allocation has moved from heresy to orthodoxy but like its predecessors it will not be the end of history a better alternative not driven by the revenue needs of government is license free spectrum users would gain entry to frequency bands on a pay as you go basis instead of controlling a slice of the spectrum they would transmit their content together with access tokens these tokens are electronic money access prices would vary with congestion set by automatic clearinghouses of spectrum users spot and futures markets for spectrum access would emerge once technology and economics can solve the interference problem in ways other than exclusivity the question arises whether the right to use the spectrum for electronic speech is the government s to sell in the first place

purchasing power parity a quantitative reassessment of the 1920s experience abstract the purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis of purchasing power parity the basic methodology is to start by estimating a general distributed lag equation relating the excchangr rate to its own past and to current and past relative price levels successively more restricted version are then proposed and tested against the general model two interesting facts come out of this one is that the proportionality restrictin is not supported by the data and the other is that all the models estimated by frenkel 1978 are rejected in favor of less restricted models

real and nominal exchange rates in the long run an empirical investigation abstract this paper reports on econometric tests of the hypothesis that purchasing power parity holds as a long run relationship using data on eight industrialized countries during the flexible exchange rate period the empirical work proceeds by i testing whether nominal exchange rates and relative price levels are co integrated and ii conducting impulse response analysis of long run exchange rate and relative price level changes to explain the data keynesian models suggest that shocks during the estimation period were due principally to exogenous shifts in aggregate demand while equilibrium models suggest that monetary factors have been relatively more important

the tradeoff of the commons we develop a model of scarce renewable resources to study the commons problem we show that contrary to conventional wisdom property rights can often be less efficient than a commons in particular we study two effects 1 waste which arises when individuals expend resources to use a resource unavailable due to congestion and 2 the risk of underutilization of the resource we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for each effect to dominate the other when the cost of determining the availability of a resource is low

purchasing power parity as a long run relation dickey fuller and stock watson tests of purchasing power parity ppp as a long run proposition are provided within the cointegration framework proposed by granger since different countries use different weights to construct price indices the traditional constraint that the coefficients on the price indices should be unity in the log linear ppp relation is relaxed the absence of a general ppp relation cannot be rejected at most a ppp relation is indicated in five out of fifteen country pairs that are examined even if a long run ppp relation exists it is not found to be useful in predicting future nominal exchange rates which is consistent with efficient speculative markets

was it real the exchange rate interest differential relation over the modern floating rate period in this paper we explore the relationship between real exchange rates and real interest rate differentials in the united states germany japan and the united kingdom contrary to theories based on the joint hypothesis that domestic prices are sticky and monetary disturbances are predominant we find little evidence of a stable relationship between real interest rates and real exchange rates we consider both in sample and out of sample tests one hypothesis that is consistent with our findings is that real disturbances such as productivity shocks may be a major source of exchange rate volatility this paper investigates the empirical relationship between major currency real exchange rates and real interest rates over the modern post march 1973 flexible rate experience the exchange rates examined here include the dollar mark dollar yen and dollar pound rates our two major findings are as follows first the data do not indicate a strong correspondence between real interest rate differentials short term or long term and real exchange rates this finding appears to conflict with the predictions of most monetary and portfolio balance models of exchange rate determination though the conflict can be substantially reconciled if aggregate disturbances are primarily real in nature i e changes in productivity tastes etc it is true that in many cases the sign of the estimated exchange rate interest rate differential relationship is consistent with the possible predominance of financial market disturbances but the relationship is not stable enough to be statistically significant second although one does find some evidence of a unit root in both real exchange rates and long term but not shortterm real interest differentials these two series do not appear to be linearly cointegrated hence the nonstationarity or near nonstationarity in the two series cannot be attributed to the same factor in section i we briefly describe a class of small scale monetary models of exchange rate determination the importance of this class of models for empirical work derives from its strong predictions about how the exchange rate will move

modeling non linearities in real effective exchange rates abstract the aim of this paper is to test for and model non linearities in the real effective exchange rates of 10 major industrial countries the g 10 to exploit non linear dependencies in exchange rates we apply the star smooth transition autoregressive family of models these non linear models imply the existence of two distinct regimes in exchange rates with potentially different dynamic properties but the transition between the regimes is smooth tests reject linearity for eight exchange rates the real exchange rate process is cyclical in both regimes for almost all countries and there appears to be some evidence of asymmetry star models outperform hamilton s markov regime switching model in an out of sample forecasting contest

vertical integration in a monopolistically competitive industry abstract this paper considers forward vertical integration by a monopolist producer of an intermediate good when the downstream industry is monopolistically competitive alternative methods of vertical control are considered in addition to the usual input mark up these include franchise fees royalties and resale price maintenance it is found that these methods in combination achieve perfect or near perfect replication of the outcome under full vertical integration the case where downstream products are differentiated by location in a circular space is studied in detail and alternative outcomes are ranked according to their social desirability

spectrum flash dance eli noam s proposal for open access to radio waves abstract as ronald coase posited in his famous article on the nature of the firm there are situations in which decentralized markets are relatively efficient for coordinating economic activity and situations in which they are not with spectrum access assigning property rights to clearly specified private owners is the socially efficient policy because the relevant transaction efficiencies will be internalized by competitive spectrum owners selecting to what degree rights should be subdivided and in what manner marketed where spot markets are optimal an owner will maximize profits by using them where long term contracts are efficient the owner will enter profitably into them hence eli noam s solution imposing open access rules on bands of radio frequencies by government mandate is a mistaken attempt to duplicate the efficiencies of markets by mandating a particular subset of market solutions such a policy predictably will result in underutilization of the spectrum resource

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

estimating the performance effects of business groups in emerging markets business groups confederations of legally independent firms are ubiquitous in emerging economies yet very little is known about their effects on the performance of affiliated firms we conceive of business groups as responses to market failures and high transaction costs in doing so we develop hypotheses about the effects of group affiliation on firm profitability affiliation could either boost or depress firm profitability and members of a group are likely to earn rates of return similar to other members of the same group using a unique data set compiled largely from local sources we test for these effects in 14 emerging markets argentina brazil chile india indonesia israel mexico peru the philippines south africa south korea taiwan thailand and turkey we find evidence that business groups indeed affect the broad patterns of economic performance in 12 of the markets we examine group affiliation appears to have as profound an effect on profitability as does industry membership yet strategy scholars have a much clearer grasp of industries than of groups moreover membership in a group raises the profitability of the average group member in several of the markets we examine this runs contrary to the wisdom conventional in advanced economies that unrelated diversification depresses profitability overall our findings suggest that the roots of sustained differences in profitability may vary across institutional contexts conclusions drawn in one context may well not apply to another copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

strategy structure and performance of korean business groups a transactions cost approach the authors use the transactions cost approach to analyze the diversification strategy and the resulting structure chosen by korean business groups to overcome market imperfections prevalent in developing countries business groups that have multidivisional struc ture are thought to show superior economic performance because such s tructure reduces transactions costs arising from organizational failure also major korean business groups have a relational structure showing both vertical integration and the characteristics of the conglomerate the authors modify the model of r e caves and m uekusa 1976 used for japan to obtain the empirical result tha t group affiliated firms show superior economic performance copyright 1988 by blackwell publishing ltd

temporal aggregation and purchasing power parity persistence this paper uses a unique new monthly us uk real exchange rate series for the january 1794 december 2009 period to reexamine the academic debate over purchasing power parity ppp the consensus view described by rogoff 1996 is that ppp holds in the long run but short run deviations are very persistent with half lives ranging from 3 to 5 years most of the literature using long time series relies on the annual data developed by lee 1976 and lothian and taylor 1996 which were both constructed from underlying higher frequency data sources estimates of purchasing power parity persistence using these series may therefore be subject to temporal aggregation bias we find evidence of aggregation bias which indicates the half life of ppp deviations has been overestimated in much of the previous literature we also find that estimates of the half lives are further reduced once we account for the harrod 1933 balassa 1964 samuelson 1964 effect the result of aggregation bias appears to be robust even when considering the case that real exchange rates exhibit nonlinear dynamics

the spectrum as commons tomorrow s vision not today s prescription abstract eli noam has proposed using nascent technologies to treat the electromagnetic spectrum as an open access commons rather than as a subdivided collection of property rights in his view public auctions reduce competition threaten free speech foster fiscal mismanagement and presume illegitimate government ownership of spectrum but government auctioning is our collective decision to sell that which we all own to foster spectrum efficiency via the market threats to free speech are exaggerated especially when asserted on behalf of corporations noam correctly observes that a government auctioneer might make too little spectrum available but concerns about fostering oligopoly are exaggerated his open access alternative would likely increase the cost of assembling the substantial long term rights to use spectrum for standardized reliable telecommunication services if the benefits of open access ever exceed the costs spectrum owners could carry out the necessary subdivision management and

resale price maintenance and forward integration into a monopolistically competitive industry in this paper we adopt the ces model of product differentiation for the downstream stage of the industry with an upstream monopolist we first show that resale price maintenance is equivalent to forward integration and that both increase profits then we demonstrate that forward integration by an upstream monopolist will reduce welfare for the industry prices fall with forward integration but the integrating firm contracts the number of downstream subsidiaries so drastically that the reduced diversity more than offsets the gains from lower prices

arima and cointegration tests of ppp under fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes real exchange rates between the united states and its major trading partners were calculated for the bretton woods and flexible exchange rate periods unit root tests indicate that purchasing power parity performed poorly in both periods tests for cointegration reveal limited instances in which it is possible to estimate the deviations from ppp as an error correcting model the estimated error correcting models indicate that foreign but not u s prices responded to deviations from ppp frenkel s 1981b finding that purchasing power parity ppp worked better during the 1920s than the 1970s caused considerable controversy for example davutyan and pippenger 1985 contend that the socalled collapse of ppp is a result of an increase in the relative importance of real versus monetary shocks they argue that the 1970s as opposed to the 1920s was characterized by real supply shocks and the international coordination of monetary policies the argument is that ppp did not fail rather there was an increase in the volatility of those factors giving rise to deviations from ppp hakkio 1984 reestimated ppp over the 1920s and 1970s using cross country tests i e sure estimates to improve the efficiency of his estimates he was able to support the hypothesis that ppp worked better in the 1970s than in the 1920s on the other hand papers by adler and lehman 1983 dornbusch 1980 frenkel 1981a junge 1985 and krugman 1978 report findings contrary to the ppp hypothesis moreover kenen and rodrik 1986 find that the volatility of real exchange rates has increased throughout the flexible rate period this paper tries to shed some light on the importance and persistence of the observed deviations from purchasing power parity under alternative exchange rate systems while it is interesting to compare ppp in the 1920s versus the 1970s it is equally useful to compare the 1960s versus the 1970s and 1980s if real supply shocks and lack of monetary coordination are characteristic of the latter period ppp should perform better in the 1960s to illustrate the issues involved consider the following econometric model of relative purchasing power

equilibrium vertical foreclosure the authors formulate a complete but analytically simple equilibrium model of vertical mergers to evaluate the logic of standard vertical foreclosure claims and the criticisms made of those claims the model includes incentives of the integrated firm and unintegrated input suppliers to exclude rivals and the potential holdout problem in this fully specified model vertical foreclosure can emerge in equilibrium copyright 1990 by american economic association

international trade and the internal organization of firms an evolutionary approach masahiko aoki and others have distinguished two alternative modes for a firm s internal organization we argue that the profitability of each mode depends on the distribution of firms across modes and on the general economic environment we characterize the evolutionary equilibria in both a parametric and a general model and argue that corner equilibria predominate we analyze the effects of trade between the two countries in a outputs only and b inputs factors as well as outputs our most striking conclusion is that in case b a less efficient mode can displace a more efficient mode when trade barriers are sufficiently low

causes of nonlinearities in low order models of the real exchange rate abstract this paper investigates the extent to which modern dsge models which feature local currency pricing home bias nontraded goods and incomplete markets can generate nonlinear real exchange rate dynamics that are consistent with those found in the time series literature using data from the current floating period our key findings are as follows first if the true model can be appropriately characterized as a set of linear equations then linearity tests that utilize univariate autoregressions of the real exchange rate suffer from an omitted variables problem which leads them to overestimate the true incidence of nonlinearity consequently studies that fail to control for this problem may spuriously find evidence of nonlinearities in the data despite the fact that the data generating process may be linear second we propose a strategy that can largely eliminate this distortion finally we find that dsge models solved using higher order approximations are capable of generating true structural nonlinearities in real exchange rates both asymptotically and in short samples

a market power based model of business groups we propose an model of vertically and horizontally integrated business groups that allows the number and size of each group to be determined endogenously we find that more than one configuration of groups can arise in equilibrium several different types of business groups can occur each of which are consistent with profit maximization and are stable we suggest that the strongly integrated groups arising in the model characterize the chaebol found in south korea whereas the less integrated groups describe those found in taiwan

the m form industrial groups american style abstract this paper reviews the evolution of industrial groups in the united states and then briefly compares their historical development with that of groups in other advanced market economies the central role of the shift from attempting to achieve market control through contractual cooperation to achieve it through administrative efficiency is underlined such a shift has occurred much earlier in the united states than in other economies

japanese microelectronics creating competitive advantage by vertical interaction abstract japanese microelectronic firms have managed their integrated businesses strategically in the sense that some activities in the vertical chain are undertaken principally as drivers for other activities at first glance the sizeable discounts in factor prices relative to market prices that routinely occur when these firms use internal sources of factor supply would seem only to lead to accounting transfers of profits with misallocation effects however it is shown that there are rather modest conditions under which market share and corporate profits are increased by such discounts unfortunately a prisoner s dilemma develops when all japanese firms act in this strategic way but each nonetheless is at an advantage relative to those foreign firms which do not

business groups and social welfare in emerging markets existing evidence and unanswered questions abstract this paper reviews existing studies of the role of emerging market business groups a ubiquitous but poorly understood organizational form i first suggest that understanding the definition of business groups is itself an interesting albeit under studied research issue i then argue that the existing evidence suggests that the performance effects of group affiliation are large and generally positive there is substantial evidence that part of this is due to welfare enhancing functions originating in the idea that groups substitute for missing outside institutions but that part is also due to welfare reducing minority shareholder exploitation evidence is lacking on the extent to which groups facilitate rent seeking or the exercise of market power evidence is also lacking on the extent to which groups hamper the future development of markets the paper identifies areas where research is needed before current competition policy experiments in countries like china india and korea can be evaluated

the effects of small sample bias in threshold autoregressive models abstract this paper investigates threshold autoregressive tar models that contain a limited number of observations in some regimes simulations show that within the context of the real exchange rate literature parameter estimates exhibit significant small sample bias even with long time series data these distortions create substantial power losses in attempting to identify values of coefficients from data

searching for nonlinearities in real exchange rates a recent innovation in modeling exchange rates has been the use of nonlinear techniques such as threshold autoregressive models and its smooth transition variants this paper investigates the smooth transition autoregressive star modeling strategy in an application to real exchange rates the key findings are as follows first using the methodology advocated by terasvirta 1994 we find evidence of nonlinear dynamics for several of the spot dollar real exchange rates using monthly data on five of the g7 countries however once estimated we find that the star specification is appropriate for only one of the three exchange rate series indicated to be an estar process moreover using simulations we show that the underlying methodology used to detect nonlinearities in the data exhibit substantial size biases which we attribute to influential observations we also investigate an alternative nonlinear specification and find that we can model the dollar sterling and the dollar lira real exchange rates better as an open loop tar process instead of a setar process

equilibrium structures in vertical oligopoly abstract the central purpose of this paper is to examine vertical integration as an equilibrium phenomenon we model it as integration between cournot oligopolists in both the upstream and the downstream stages we consider the issue of private profitability versus collective profitability and show that under several situations the equilibrium outcomes may result in a prisoner s dilemma the analysis is extended to consider equilibrium outcomes in a dynamic setting where we find no integration to be a relatively common outcome

corporate structure liquidity and investment evidence from japanese industrial groups this paper presents evidence suggesting that information and incentive problems in the capital market affect investment we come to this conclusion by examining two sets of japanese firms the first set has close financial ties to large japanese banks that serve as their primary source of external finance and are likely to be well informed about the firm the second set of firms has weaker links to a main bank and presumably faces greater problems raising capital investment is more sensitive to liquidity for the second set of firms than for the first set the analysis also highlights the role of financial intermediaries in the investment process

on the costs of a bank centered financial system evidence from the changing main bank relations in japan we examine the effects of bank firm relationships on firm performance in japan when access to capital markets is limited close bank firm ties increase the availability of capital to borrowing firms but do not lead to higher profitability or growth the cost of capital of firms with close bank ties is higher than that of their peers this indicates that most of the benefits from these relationships are appropriated by the banks finally the slow growth rates of bank clients suggest that banks discourage firms from investing in risky profitable projects however liberalization of financial markets reduces the banks market power the close relationship between manufacturing firms and financial institutions in japan has recently been at the center of the debate on the appropriate financial system for the reforming economies of eastern europe as opposed to the anglo saxon separation of finance and industry long term ties between main banks and their client firms involving bank loans bank equity holding and some bank appointed personnel which are common in japan and germany have often been described as a growth oriented financial system that could serve the needs of developing and reformed economiies better than anonymous capital markets modeled after the arnerican and british financial systems the claim that close ties between investmentoriented banks and industrial firms could help overcome the difficulties of relative backwardness dates back to gerschenkron 1962 who investigates european development rosovsky 1961 applies gerschenkron s framework to the analysis of japanese growth more recently aoki patrick and sheard 1994 hoshi kashyap and loveman 1994 and teranishi 1993 among others portray the close ties between finance and industry in japan as an important factor in the international competitiveness of modern japanese

the purchasing power parity debate originally propounded by the 16th century scholars of the university of salamanca the concept of purchasing power parity ppp was revived in the interwar period in the context of the debate concerning the appropriate level at which to re establish international exchange rate parities broadly accepted as a long run equilibrium condition in the post war period it first was advocated as a short run equilibrium by many international economists in the first few years following the breakdown of the bretton woods system in the early 1970s and then increasingly came under attack on both theoretical and empirical grounds from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s accordingly over the last three decades a large literature has built up that examines how much the data deviated from theory and the fruits of this research have provided a deeper understanding of how well ppp applies in both the short run and the long run since the mid 1990s larger datasets and nonlinear econometric methods in particular have improved estimation as deviations narrowed between real exchange rates and ppp so did the gap narrow between theory and data and some degree of confidence in long run ppp began to emerge again in this respect the idea of long run ppp now enjoys perhaps its strongest support in more than 30 years a distinct reversion in economic thought

transactions costs and nonlinear adjustment in real exchange rates an empirical investigation eolquilibrium models of real exchange rate determination in the presence of transactions costs imply a nonlinear adjustment process toward purchasing power parity ppp conventional cointegration tests which ignore the effect of transactions costs may be biased against the long run ppp hypothesis our results using both monthly data for the interwar period and annual data spanning two centuries clearly reject the linear framework in favor of an exponential smooth transition autoregressive process the systematic pattern in the estimates of the nonlinear models provides strong evidence of mean reverting behavior for ppp deviations and helps explain the mixed results of previous studies

market culture and authority a comparative analysis of management and organization in the far east three frameworks purport to explain industrial arrangements and practices a market approach that emphasizes economic characteristics a cultural approach that sees organization as the expression of patterned values and an authority approach that explains organization as a historically developed structure of domination the efficacy of each approach is tested in explaining the organizational structures of three rapidly growing east asian economies japan south korea and taiwan the paper argues through comparative analysis that organizational growth is best explained by market and cultural factors but that authority patterns and legitimation strategies best explain organizational structure

an empirical examination of long run purchasing power parity using cointegration techniques this paper presents an empirical analysis of long run purchasing power parity ppp for five major exchange rates using recently developed econometric techniques on the cointegration of economic time series our empirical results are extremely unfavourable to the ppp hypothesis as a long run equilibrium condition even with an allowance made for measurement error and or tranportation costs in particular we are unable to reject the hypothesis of non cointegration of the exchange rate and relative prices for any of the countries concerned far from finding a stable long run proportionality between exchange rates and relative prices our results therefore suggest that they tend to drift apart without bound

optimal abolition of fcc spectrum allocation ronald coase based his 1959 call for spectrum markets on theoretical conjecture today abundant evidence supports his case targeted liberalization in cellular markets as contrasted with regulatory planning of the digital tv transition and other traditional policies suggest enormous efficiency gains are available from wider use of the price system with exclusive frequency rights assigned to owners markets widely reconfigure spectrum use coordinating complex spectrum sharing resulting social gains include increased consumer surplus from enhanced technological innovation and wireless service competition a social bonus arrives in the benefits associated with wider scope for free speech yet the administrative allocation system continues to distribute rents and garner political support liberal reforms in contrast produce large but broadly dispersed efficiency gains and are undersupplied this paper proposes an incremental extension of property rights in spectrum to move beyond the current rent seeking equilibrium eliminating the federal communications commission s centralized spectrum allocation process and with it an attractive nuisance generating anticonsumer outcomes

equilibrium vertical foreclosure reply in ordover saloner and salop 1990 hereafter oss we showed that a downstream duopolist may have an incentive to backward integrate in order to foreclose its downstream rival from a source of upstream supply as a result of the vertical integration the downstream rival s input price increases giving the integrating firm a competitive advantage in the downstream market moreover in equilibrium the foreclosed downstream rival does not find it profitable to negate these effects by integrating itself oss considers a four stage game involving two upstream firms ul and u2 and two downstream firms dl and d2 in the first stage the downstream firms can bid to acquire ul if there is an acquisition say dl acquires ul to form f1 upstream input prices are set in the second stage in the third stage knowing the input prices it faces d2 can attempt to acquire u2 finally in the fourth stage dl and d2 compete a la bertrand with differentiated products in his comment david reiffen 1992 makes three distinct points first he notes that once dl has acquired ul the equilibrium of the subsequent subgame depends critically on how upstream prices are set in the second stage he argues that our results depend on the ability of fl to commit to a high upstream price this criticism previously has been made by oliver hart and jean tirole 1990 we show below that the results in oss do not depend on the ability of fl to commit instead our main result stems from the fact that vertical integration changes the firm s incentives to engage in price cutting in the input market the notion that vertically integrated firms behave differently from unintegrated ones in supplying inputs to downstream rivals would strike a businessperson if not an economist as common sense 1 we show that there is theoretical merit to that common sense view second reiffen argues that the game considered by oss is similar to a game in which there is no vertical integration but rather where a nonintegrated dl has a first mover advantage in the downstream market in such a game dl benefits from the ability to commit to the price that its stackelberg leadership position gives it reiffen considers this to be additional evidence in support of the claim that oss depends critically on fl s ability to commit not on vertical integration we explain why the mechanism by which dl is able to raise its profits in the sequential one shot game considered by reiffen is conceptually quite different from the mechanism by which dl profits from vertical integration in oss third reiffen argues that our results depend on there being only two upstream firms this is correct in the symmetric bertrand model analyzed however as we discuss below our results do obtain as long as the upstream price is decreasing in the number of firms as occurs in many oligopoly models particularly when costs vary across firms the next section summarizes the conceptual problems pertaining to upstream pricing these problems are resolved in section ii by means of simple and natural price ordover department of economics new york university 269 mercer st 7th floor new york ny 10003 saloner graduate school of business stanford university stanford ca 94305 salop georgetown university law center 600 new jersey avenue nw washington dc 20001 we have benefited greatly from several discussions with faruk gul research support from the national science foundation grant 8813943 iri the sloan foundation and the c v starr center for applied economics at nyu is gratefully acknowledged for example the japan u s strategic impediments initiative is predicated on the proposition that the loosely linked japanese firms that form the various keiretsu do discriminate against nonaffiliated firms