hospital choices hospital prices and financial incentives to physicians we estimate an insurer speci c preference function which rationalizes hospital referrals for privately insured births in california the function is additively separable in a hospital price paid by the insurer the distance traveled and plan and severity speci c hospital xed eects capturing hospital quality we use an inequality estimator that allows for errors in price and detailed hospital severity interactions and obtain markedly dierent results than those from a logit the estimates indicate that insurers with more capitated physicians are more responsive to price capitated plans send patients further to utilize similar quality lower priced hospitals but the cost quality trade odoes not vary with capitation rates the patient protection and aordable care act of 2010 includes provisions to establish ac countable care organizations acos in the medicare program these are groups of health care providers that oer services to a large number of patients and are eligible to share in any cost savings they achieve for the medicare program 1 private sector acos are forming in parallel to this initiative often with very similar structures and payment arrangements the proportion of savings acos keep is linked to their performance on quality standards the goal of the initiative is to reduce health care costs in both medicare and private insurance and to improve coordination of care the tying of cost savings to quality standards is designed to mitigate the concern that an increase in incentives to control costs might lead to a decrease in the quality of care the health policy literature has noted that similar cost control incentives are currently utilized by some health maintenance organizations hmos in california and elsewhere 2 in this paper we investigate the impact of these incentives on the cost and quality of care provided to patients focusing in particular on the choice of hospital for privately insured patients giving birth we use

interest rate innovations and the volatility of long term bond yields this paper develops and tests restrictions on the variance of innovations in long term bond yields implied by the expectations model of the term structure the authors adapt kenneth d west s 1988 stock price volatility tests to the case of long but finite maturity bonds their approximate equality restriction does not require short term rates to be stationary and hence provides a unified framework for volatility testing when short rates are modeled as stationary long rate innovations appear excessively volatile when short rates are modeled as difference stationary long rate innovations appear excessively smooth copyright 1994 by ohio state university press

do switching costs make markets less competitive abstract the conventional wisdom in economic theory holds that switching costs make markets less competitive this article challenges this claim the authors formulate an empirically realistic model of dynamic price competition that allows for differentiated products and imperfect lock in they calibrate this model with data from frequently purchased packaged goods markets these data are ideal in the sense that they have the necessary variation to identify switching costs separately from consumer heterogeneity equally important consumers exhibit inertia in their brand choices a form of psychological switching cost this makes the results applicable to the broad range of products that are distinctly identified i e branded rather than just to products for which there is a product adoption cost or explicit switching fee in the simulations prices are as much as 18 lower with than without switching costs more important equilibrium prices do not increase even in the presence of switching costs that

a comparison of oligopoly welfare loss estimates for u s food manufacturing capitalizing on theoretical advances in calculating deadweight welfare losses due to imperfect competition we compare eight empirical estimates for the u s food manufacturing industries the estimates incorporate varying theoretical assumptions about demand supply and firm pricing behavior and utilize various data sources time periods and assumptions about the proper competitive benchmark while the estimates of average allocative losses range widely there is a high degree of congruence in the rankings of economic losses due to market power thus from the perspective of efficient antitrust enforcement the newer theoretical oligopoly approaches and the traditional structure conduct performance models would target similar industries

a note on the local expectations hypothesis a discrete time exposition cox ingersoll and ross 1 distinguished various forms of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates they proved that with one exception these are consistent with general equilibrium only in the trivial case in which interest rates are nonrandom the exception is the local expectations hypothesis because of this nonexistence result those who regard the expectations hypothesis as a natural starting point in investigating the term structure of interest rates are motivated to understand under what restrictions the local expectations hypothesis is valid in our experience many readers of cox ingersoll and ross s paper particularly those not conversant with stochastic calculus have difficulty following the discussion such readers may find it easier to work through an analysis of the local expectations hypothesis in a more familiar discrete time framework this paper provides such an exposition in continuous time the local expectations hypothesis states that the conditional expected rates of return on bonds of all maturities over the next instant are equal to each other and to the instantaneous spot interest rate cox ingersoll and ross proved p 783 ff that the local expectations hypothesis is valid in an exchange economy if the dynamics of consumption are locally certain in a stochastic constant returns to scale production economy they showed that the local expectations hypothesis will be valid under locally certain production dynamics if in addition agents have logarithmic utility the analogous definition of the local expectations hypothesis in discrete time is that the conditionally expected one period rates of return on bonds of all maturities are equal to each other and to the one period interest rate two examples below illustrate that the local expectations hypothesis is valid in discrete time economies under the same conditions as in continuous time economies these examples work because a sufficient condition for the validity of the local expectations hypothesis is that the marginal utility of consumption be locally certain this might happen either because consumption itself is locally certain as in both of the above mentioned examples or because the utility function exhibits risk neutrality and there is strictly positive consumption in every period a third example shows that risk neutrality alone does not imply the local expectations hypothesis if zero consumption can occur the reason is that the implication of risk neutrality that rates of interest are nonrandom requires the exclusion of corner solutions a restriction which is violated if zero consumption can occur

a cointegration analysis of treasury bill yields this paper shows that yields to maturity of u s treasury bills are cointegrated and that during periods when the federal reserve specifically targeted short term interest rates the spreads between yields of different maturity define the cointegrating vectors this cointegrating relationship implies that a single nonstationary common factor underlies the time series behavior of each yield to maturity and that risk premia are stationary an error correction model that uses spreads as the error correction terms is unstable over the federal reserve s policy regime changes but a model using post 1982 data is stable and is shown to be useful for forecasting changes in yields copyright 1992 by mit press

measuring advertising intensity and intangible capital in the greek food industry the objective of the present paper is to examine market conduct and its determinants in the greek food industry and to measure how and to what degree the industry and the firm s structural characteristics affect advertising intensity an advertising intensity model giving emphasis to intangible capital is formulated data from icap have been used on a four digit classification for the food industry during the 1990 1997 period the empirical results indicate that intangible capital positively affects the advertising intensity of the firm and plays an important role in strategies that affect total cost demand and structure of the market

a simple account of the behavior of long term interest rates recent empirical research on the term structure of interest rates has shown that the long term interest rate is well described by a distributed lag on short term interest rates but does not conform to the expectations theory of the term structure it has been suggested that the long rate overreacts to the short rate this paper presents aunified taxonomy of risk premia or deviations from the expectations theory this enables the hypothesis of overreaction to be formally stated it is shown that if anything the long rate has underreacted to the short rate however the independent movement of the long rate is primarily responsible for the failure of the expectations theory

asymmetric cost pass through empirical evidence on the role of market power search and menu costs abstract we estimate cost pass through rates based on data for store level retail prices and wholesale costs for up to 90 different brands of milk sold in 327 retail stores across germany the abundance of the data allows us to identify heterogeneity in pass through across retailers and relate it to underlying explanatory factors such as retailer market power measures of consumer search and menu costs results from a threshold error correction process clearly provide empirical support for the rockets and feathers phenomenon prices increase more quickly than they decrease in contrast to much of the existing literature which explains the rockets and feathers phenomenon as a result of retailers exercising market power we find the opposite result the degree of asymmetry in prices is negatively related to market power decreases with the lerner index our measure of cross product search costs does not account for observable differences in asymmetric cost pass through rates between products the rockets and feathers observation is better explained by product specific differences in menu costs mistake costs and costs associated with stock outs which can lead to a loss of consumer goodwill

own brand and cross brand retail pass through in this paper we describe the pass through behavior of a major u s supermarket chain for 78 products across 11 categories our data set includes retail prices and wholesale prices for stores in 15 retail price zones for a one year period for the empirical model we use a reduced form approach that focuses directly on equilibrium prices as a function of exogenous supply and demand shifting variables the reduced form approach enables us to identify the theoretical pass through rate without specific assumptions about the form of consumer demand or the conduct of a category pricing manager thus our measurements of pass through are not constrained by specific structure on the underlying economic model the empirical pricing model includes costs of all competing products in the category on the right hand side not only the cost of the focal brand and yields estimates of both own brand and cross brand pass through rates our results provide a rich picture of the retailer s pass through behavior we find that pass through varies substantially across products and across categories own brand pass through rates are on average more than 60 for 9 of 11 categories a finding that is at odds with the claims of manufacturers about retailers in general importantly we find substantial evidence of cross brand pass through effects indicating that retail prices of competing products are adjusted in response to a change in the wholesale price of any given product in the category we find that cross brand pass through rates are both positive and negative we explore determinants of own brand and cross brand pass through rates and find strong evidence in multiple categories of asymmetric retailer response to trade promotions on large versus small brands for example brands with larger market shares and brands that contribute more to retailer profits in the category receive higher pass through we also find that trade promotions on large brands are less likely than small brands to generate positive cross brand pass through i e induce the retailer to reduce the retail price of competing smaller products on the other hand small share brands are disadvantaged along three dimensions trade promotions on small brands receive low own brand pass through and generate positive cross brand pass through for larger competing brands moreover small share brands do not receive positive cross pass through from trade promotions on these larger competitors we also find that store brands are similarly disadvantaged with respect to national brands

federal reserve interest rate targeting rational expectations and the term structure abstract the amount of information in the yield curve for forecasting future changes in short rates varies with the maturity of the rates involved indeed spreads between certain long and short rates appear unrelated to future changes in the short rate contrary to the rational expectations hypothesis of the term structure this paper estimates a daily model of federal reserve interest rate targeting behavior which accompanied by the maintained hypothesis of rational expectations explains the varying predictive ability of the yield curve and elucidates the link between fed policy and the term structure

manufacturer retailer channel interactions and implications for channel power an empirical investigation of pricing in a local market the issue of power in the marketing channels for consumer products has received considerable attention in both academic and practitioner journals as well as in the popular press our objective in this paper is to provide an empirical method to measure the power of channel members and to understand the reasons demand factors cost factors nature of channel interactions for this power we confine our analysis to pricing power in channels we use methods from the game theory literature in marketing on channel interactions to obtain the theoretical framework for our empirical model this literature provides us a definition of power one that is based on the proportion or percentage of channel profits that accrue to each of the channel members there can be a variety of possible channel interactions between manufacturers and retailers in channels the theoretical literature has examined some of these games for example choi 1991 examines how channel profits for manufacturers and retailer vary if channel interactions are either vertical nash or if they are stackelberg leaderfollower with either the manufacturer or the retailer being the price leader each of these three channel interaction games has different implications for profits made by manufacturers and retailers and consequently for the relative power of the channel members in contrast to the previous literature that has focused largely on the above three channel interaction games our model extends the game theoretic literature by allowing for a continuum of possible channel interactions between manufacturers and a retailer furthermore for a given product market we empirically estimate from the data where the channel interactions lie in this continuum more critically we obtain measures of how channel profits are divided between manufacturers and the retailer in the product market where a higher share of channel profit is associated with higher channel power we then examine how channel power is related to demand conditions facing various brands and cost parameters of various manufacturers in going from game theory based theoretical models of channel interactions to empirical estimation we use the new empirical industrial organization framework bresnahan 1988 as part of this structural modeling framework we build retail level demand functions for the various brands manufacturer and private label in a given product category given these demand functions we obtain optimal pricing rules for manufacturers and the retailer in determining their optimal prices manufacturers and the retailer account for how all the players in the channel choose their optimal prices that is we account for dependencies in decision making across channel members these dependencies are characterized by a set of conduct parameters which are estimated from market data the conduct parameters enable us to identify the nature of channel interactions between manufacturers and the retailer along the continuum mentioned previously in addition to the demand and conduct parameters manufacturers marginal costs are also estimated in the model these marginal cost estimates along with the manufacturer prices and retail prices available in our dataset enable us to compute the division of channel profits among the channel members hence we are able to obtain insights into who has pricing power in the channel in the empirical application of the model we analyze a local market for two product categories refrigerated juice and tuna in both categories there are three major brands the difference between them is that the private label has an insignificant market share in the tuna category our main empirical results show that the usual games examined in the marketing literature do not hold for the given data we also nd that the retailer s market power is very significant in both these product categories and that the estimated demand and cost parameters are consistent with the estimated pattern of conduct between the manufacturers and the retailer given the evidence from the trade press of intense manufacturer competition in these categories as well as the commodity nature of these products the result of retailer power appears intuitive

interest rate co movements global factors and the long end of the term spread the decoupling of us short and long interest rates has been a distinctive feature of the 2000s we employ recent advances in panel econometrics to document this disconnect for industrial countries and link it to a global latent factor in long term rates we investigate whether international forces such as global inflation global output or the global savings glut may be behind this global latent factor the savings glut is the most likely contender suggesting that reserve accumulation and a search for yield from emerging markets has lowered long rates internationally driving a wedge between domestic short and long rates

what determines the elasticity of industry demand abstract this paper develops estimates of price elasticity of demand for a sample of u s food and tobacco manufacturing industries and tests a model explaining differences in interindustry elasticity the empirical results are consistent with the hypothesis that demand elasticity is in part determined by the competitive behavior of firms in an industry in particular high advertising expenditures result in lower elasticities of demand other important variables influencing demand elasticity are industry concentration the stage of production the existence of protection from domestic and foreign entry and the extent of new product introduction in a particular market

why do previous choices matter for hospital demand decomposing switching costs from unobserved preferences abstract using data on women s choice of hospital for childbirth in florida we find that women return to the same hospital approximately 70 of the time we separate explanations of switching cost

state dependence and alternative explanations for consumer inertia for many consumer packaged goods products researchers have documented inertia in brand choice a form of persistence whereby consumers have a higher probability of choosing a product that they have purchased in the past using data on margarine and refrigerated orange juice purchases we show that the finding of inertia is robust to flexible controls for preference heterogeneity and not due to autocorrelated taste shocks thus the inertia is at least partly due to structural not spurious state dependence we explore three economic explanations for the observed structural state dependence preference changes due to past purchases or consumption experiences which induce a form of loyalty search and learning our data are consistent with loyalty but not with search or learning properly distinguishing among the dierent sources of inertia is important for policy analysis because the alternative sources of inertia imply qualitative dierences in firm s pricing incentives and lead to quantitatively dierent equilibrium

mergers when prices are negotiated evidence from the hospital industry in recent years many hospitals have merged in part to gain bargaining leverage with managed care organizations mcos we investigate the price impact of hospital mergers by formulating and estimating an equilibrium bargaining model between hospital systems and managed care health insurers over prices for inpatient services we estimate the parameters of the model using claims and discharge data from northern virginia in 2006 inova health system proposed to acquire prince william hospital we nd that this merger would have raised prices signicantly and that the remedy of separate bargaining imposed by the ftc in a separate hospital case would have resulted in a larger price increase

arbitrage cointegration and testing the unbiasedness hypothesis in financial markets we use a no arbitrage cost of carry asset pricing model to show that the existence of coin tegration between spot and forward futures prices depends on the time series properties of the cost of carry we argue that the conditions for cointegration are more likely to hold in currency markets than in commodity markets explaining many of the empirical results in the literature we also use this model to demonstrate why the forward rate forecast error the basis and the forward premium are serially correlated and to develop econometric tests ofthe unbiasedness hypothesis sometimes called the simple efficiency hypothesis in various financial markets the unbiasedness hypothesis is so prevalent in the finance liter ature that many tests for it have been developed we examine four of the common tests and and use our cointegration results to demonstrate why each of these tests should reject the null hypothesis of unbiasedness we find strong support for our hypothesis in the existing empirical literature

real interest rate equalization and the integration of international financial markets abstract this paper argues that conventional regression tests of real interest rate equality may be misleading because they neglect to consider transactions costs a transactions cost band may inhibit the one to one correspondence between changes in real rates in alternative countries that is presumed by conventional tests statistical problems which may lead to incorrect inferences in conventional tests are also discussed alternative tests which overcome these limitations are developed and applied to real interest rates for ten different countries the alternative tests generate much stronger support for interest parity than is found in the existing literature

optimal dynamic volume based price regulation abstract we consider a model of optimal price regulation in markets where demand is sluggish and asymmetric providers compete on quality using a spatial model which is suitable to investigate the health care and education sector we analyse within a dynamic set up the scope for price premiums or penalties on volume under the assumption of symmetric cost information we show that the socially optimal time path of quality provision off the steady state can be replicated by a simple dynamic pricing rule where the dynamic part of the rule is ex ante non discriminatory in the sense that the price premium or penalty on volume is common across providers despite their differing production costs whether the price schedule involves a penalty or a premium on volume relates to two concerns regarding production costs and consumer benefits which go in opposite directions price adjustments over time occur only through the price penalty or premium not time directly which highlights the simplicity and thus applicability of this regulation scheme

market structure determinants of national brand private label price differences of manufactured food products reply this paper estimates the relationships between market structure and the lerner index of monopoly constructed from price data on processed food products sold through grocery stores a theoretical model of a differentiated oligopoly specifies two determinants of price cost margins the herfindahl hirschman index of seller concentration adjusted for the elasticity of demand and the industry advertising to sales ratio the results indicate that the three principal determinants of price cost margin variation in order of their impacts are advertising intensity elasticity of demand and concentration previous structure performance studies that did not incorporate the elasticity of demand were probably misspecified

rational expectations econometric analysis of changes in regime an investigation of the term structure of interest rates abstract this paper is of interest both for its methodological contribution of new tools for analyzing rational expectations models and for its substantive conclusions concerning the term structure of interest rates during the monetary experiment of october 1979 the paper studies systems subject to changes in regime interpreted here as occasional discrete shifts in the parameters governing the time series behavior of exogenous economic variables the specification is shown to be quite tractable both theoretically and empirically the technique is used to analyze yields on three month treasury bills and ten year treasury bonds during 1962 to 1987 a constant parameter linear model for short term rates is shown to be inconsistent both with the univariate time series properties of short rates and with the observed bivariate relation between long and short rates under the expectations hypothesis of the term structure an alternative nonlinear model that admits the possibility of changes in regime affords a much better description of the univariate process for short rates moreover the cross equation restrictions implied by the expectations hypothesis of the term structure are consistent with the nonlinear specification indeed the residuals of the restricted relation have a standard error of only 0 8 basis points this is a third less than that of a completely unrestricted linear regression of long rates on short rates and compares with an unconditional standard deviation of long rates of 142 basis points i conclude that once the recognition by bond traders of changes in regime is taken into account the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates holds up fairly well for these data

benchmarking the expectations hypothesis of the interest rate term structure an analysis of cointegration vectors i test cointegration restrictions that are consistent with the expectations hypothesis of the term structure by employing the full information maximum likelihood methods developed by johansen yield curves appear to be the result of cointegration among interest rates the cointegration vectors that best describe the long term impact of interest rate levels on interest rate changes can often be written as linear combinations of interest rate spreads there is however difficulty in keeping short term yields in such a restricted cointegrated system with other interest rates short term speculative returns from long term bonds do not conform to the expectations hypothesis

how do advertised brands benefit from private labels an application of rational expectations models private labels have traditionally been viewed as a threat to advertised brands contrary to traditional wisdom this study uses a two asset rational expectations model to show that advertised brands could benefit from private labels while the manufacturer s advertising creates product differentiation the retailer s synchronous pricing strategy further enhances the product differentiation and raises profits as well as the efficiency of price discounts for the advertised brand in addition the existence of private labels improves the advertising efficiency especially for newly introduced brands the economic role of private labels is not limited to taking a free ride on the manufacturer s advertising efforts and this role cannot be replaced by another advertised brand

a defense of traditional hypotheses about the term structure of interest rates expectations theories of asset returns may be interpreted either as stating that risk premia are zero or that they are constant through time under the former interpretation different versions of the expectations theory of the term structure are inconsistent with one another but i show that this does not necessarily carry over to the constant risk premium interpretation of the theory i present a general equilibrium example in which different types of risk premium are constant through time and dependent only on maturity furthermore i argue that differences among expectations theories are secondorder effects of bond yield variability i develop an approximate linearized framework for analysis of the term structure in which these differences disappear and i test its accuracy in practice using data from the crsp government bond tapes in a well known article in this journal cox ingersoll and ross cir 4 reexamine and find wanting certain hypotheses about the term structure of interest rates a striking feature of cir s re examination is that it is entirely theoretical cir show that different versions of the pure expectations theory of the term structure which traditionally were regarded as equivalent are in fact inconsistent with one another when interest rates are random furthermore in a fairly general continuous time arbitrage pricing framework when interest rates are random all versions of the theory except one are incompatible with equilibrium at first sight cir s results appear to be devastating to traditional empirical work on the term structure they suggest that researchers must specify arbitrage pricing models with a small number of state variables before proceeding to empirical work such models must restrict not only the deterministic components

shifting endpoints in the term structure of interest rates abstract this paper links the term structure to perceptions of monetary policy long horizon forecasts of short rates required by no arbitrage term structure models are heavily influenced by the endpoints or limiting conditional forecasts of the short rate process common assumptions that the short rate is mean reverting or contains a unit root are shown to generate unrealistic yield predictions failures occur because these assumptions inadequately account for historical shifts in market perceptions of the policy target for inflation this paper links endpoint shifts to agent learning about shifts in long term policy goals shifting endpoints in short rate processes significantly improve yield predictions

a critical assessment of supply demand models of agricultural trade we offer a critical assessment of static deterministic reduced form supply demand sd models of agricultural trade a commonly used and well documented model has significant limitations no explicit treatment of factor mobility between farm and nonfarm sectors nonzero profits in some sectors no substitutability among feedstuffs in livestock sectors violation of the law of one price small marketing margins for some commodities and incomplete coverage of the agricultural sector such limitations have significant impacts on the magnitude and direction of projected world price and welfare changes we believe agricultural policy analysis should first focus on the remediation of these limitations before proceeding to more complex issues like dynamics and uncertainty

explaining the failures of the term spread models of the rational expectations hypothesis of the term structure contrary to the predictions of the rational expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates empirical evidence suggests that the term spread between long and short rates fails to forecast future movements of long term rates although its forecasts of future short term rates are in the correct direction in this paper the authors show that this puzzling behavior of the term spread alone can be explained by a time varying term premium that is correlated with the term spread once this is accounted for neither expression of the expectations hypothesis is against the predictions of the theory copyright 1997 by ohio state university press

cointegration and detectable linear and nonlinear causality analysis using the london metal exchange lead contract this study applies linear and nonlinear granger causality tests to examine the dynamic relation between london metal exchange lme cash prices and three possible predictors the analysis uses matched quarterly inventory uk treasury bill interest rates futures prices and cash prices for the commodity lead traded on the lme the effects of cointegration on both linear and nonlinear granger causality tests is also examined when cointegration is not modelled evidence is found of both linear and nonlinear causality between cash prices and analysed predictor variables however after controlling for cointegration evidence of significant nonlinear causality is no longer found these results contribute to the empirical literature on commodity price forecasting by highlighting the relationship between cointegration and detectable linear and nonlinear causality the importance of interest rate and inventory as well as futures price in forecasting cash prices is also illustrated failure to detect significant

assessing the competitive interaction between private labels and national brands in this article we employ the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids and specify price reaction equations derived under the la aids specification we perform intracategory analyses using data on six individual categories as well as a pooled analysis on a sample of 125 categories and 59 geographic markets we find that consumer response to price and promotion decisions demand and firm pricing behavior supply jointly determine observed market prices and market shares further estimates of residual demand elasticities suggest that examination of partial demand elasticities alone may provide an incomplete picture of the ability of brands to raise price copyright 2000 by university of chicago press

adverse selection and inertia in health insurance markets when nudging hurts this paper investigates consumer inertia in health insurance markets where adverse selection is a potential concern we leverage a major change to insurance provision that occurred at a large firm to identify substantial inertia and develop and estimate a choice model that also quantifies risk preferences and ex ante health risk we use these estimates to study the impact of policies that nudge consumers toward better decisions by reducing inertia when aggregated these improved individual level choices substantially exacerbate adverse selection in our setting leading to an overall reduction in welfare that doubles the existing welfare loss from adverse selection jel d82 g22 i13 a number of potential impediments stand in the way of efficient health insur ance markets the most noted of these is adverse selection first studied by akerlof 1970 and rothschild and stiglitz 1976 in insurance markets prices reflect the expected risk costs of the insured pool whether the reason is price regulation or private information when insurers cannot price all risk characteristics riskier consumers choose more comprehensive health plans this causes the equilibrium prices of these plans to rise and healthier enrollees to select less comprehensive coverage than they would otherwise prefer

further evidence on competition in the us grain export trade this study analyzes the relationship between export market structure and the pricing behavior of u s grain exporting firms a generalized cournot model is estimated by two stage least squares using pooled data sets for u s wheat and corn exports the cross sectional units correspond to foreign country destinations discriminatory export pricing behavior was found to be significantly related to export seller concentration u s market share total export volume and import market size yet the estimated coefficients linking these market structure variables to the export price markup were relatively small in magnitude suggesting little quantitative impact from market power copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

lending competition and credit availability for new firms empirical study with the price cost margin in regional loan markets abstract in this paper i present statistical evidence of the impact of lending competition on credit availability for new firms a discrete time duration analysis with respect to the years from the start up to the first loan approval by a commercial bank or a cooperative bank which is collected from survey data in japan shows that the higher price cost margin pcm of banks which reflects the existence of a quasi rent for a bank improves the credit availability for younger firms additional analysis to detect the regional determinants of the pcm of banks shows that the share of larger banks in each local credit market has a negative and significant impact on the pcm in light of the existing empirical finding that smaller banks are more likely to provide relationship banking these findings provide indirect evidence for the hypothesis that the intensity of relationship banking in each local credit market increases the pcm and this encourages banks to extend a loan to new firms so that they can pre empt the opportunity to establish lending relationships that are expected to yield such quasi rents

the case of the negative nominal interest rates new estimates of the term structure of interest rates during the great depression throughout the 1930s and early 1940s u s treasury bonds and notes appeared to have negative nominal yields as they approached maturity but negative nominal interest rates are impossible in a world in which one can always hold cash the resolution to this puzzle is that treasury securities in addition to making coupon payments gave the owner the right to buy a new security on a future date this paper describes the institutional environment that led to the apparent negative nominal interest rates develops a method for valuing the exchange privilege and computes accurate measures of the yield to the coupon bearing component of these composite bond options these corrected bond and not yields are then used to calculate new estimates of the term structure of interest rates from 1929 to 1949

tariff choice with consumer learning and switching costs abstract consumers choosing flat rate contracts tend to have insufficient usage to warrant the cost particularly for new products we propose and estimate a bayesian learning model of tariff and usage choice that explains this flat rate bias without relying on behavioral misjudgments or tariff specific preferences for new products consumers are uncertain about both their utility relative to the population mean and the mean itself we show that this latter uncertainty inflates prior variances which leads consumers to weight their private signals more heavily when updating beliefs posteriors are unbiased across products for a given product however the unknown mean yields a winner s curse consumers with high posteriors tend to overestimate their utility these consumers choose fixed rate tariffs and lower their usage as they correct their beliefs the flat rate bias arises when switching costs deter them from changing tariffs using the estimated model the authors find that tariff menus are ineff