Collusion with intertemporal price dispersion

We develop a theory of optimal collusive intertemporal price dispersion. Dispersion clouds consumer price awareness, encouraging firms to coordinate on dispersed prices. Our theory generates a collusive rationale for price cycles and sales. Patient firms can support optimal collusion at the monopoly price. For less patient firms, monopoly prices must be punctuated with fleeting sales. The most robust structure involves price cycles that resemble Edgeworth cycles. Low consumer attentiveness enhances the effectiveness of price dispersion by reducing the payoff to deviations involving price reductions. However, for sufficiently low attentiveness, price rises are also a concern.     

New transport system formation as an entrance to the world market for Siberian regions

Russia is now essentially more open to the world market and to the world community. The geographical reasons predetermine the shortest way of connection between Europe and North East Asia (NEA); it is the railroad through Russia, using Transsiberia. The Yenisei River is the shortest and the cheapest way to the North East Route (NER) for many regions of Siberia. The problem of using NER is now very interesting for the states of Northern Europe, Japan, and South Korea. There are a lot of resources in Siberia—timber, nonferrous metals (lead and zinc), gold, oil and gas, and the cheapest source of electricity. Based on this combination, it is possible to produce many kinds of goods (not only resources). There are some negotiations with China, Japan, and South Korea about the so‐called “East Energy Bridge,” for the purpose of the transmission of electricity and gas from East Siberia.     

Private sector employment in Russia: Scale, composition and performance

In Russia, as across Central and Eastern Europe, privatization and the establishmemt of new private firms have been viewed as key factors in labour market adjustment during the transition period. This paper considers the overall employment developments in the private sector in Russia and the extent to which the private sector employment performance is differentiated from that of other sectors in five Russian regions. The analysis is based on a fresh look at these issues using official statistics published by Goskomstat and drawing on microdata from the March 1996 Russian Labour Force Survey (LFS). A special questionnaire attached to the LFS in the study regions provides supplementary information.
The paper highlights shifts in the sectoral composition of employment, including growth in private sector employment. Compared to other forms of ownership, the analysis confirms a tendency for private sector ownership in the study regions to be associated with stronger employment performance with respect to hours worked and, in some cases, timely payment of wages. Private sector firms appear to have relatively flexible employment patterns, utilizing more fixed-term or part-time employment than other types of firms and experiencing greater labour turnover. Also, private sector employees tend to be somewhat younger and probably more adaptable people. However, there is significant variation across the study regions and substantial exceptions exist with respect to the above-mentioned tendencies. With respect to employment issues, the differentiation between sectors appears to be less pronounced than one might have expected.     

Clustering of Territorial Areas: A Multi-Criteria Districting Problem

Journal of Quantitative Economics - This paper aims to propose a framework for obtaining homogenous territorial clusters based on a max-p-regions optimisation problem, considering multiple criteria...     

Innovation of IT metasystems by means of event-driven paradigm using QDMS

Globalisation of world economy brings new and more complex demands to business systems. In order to respond to these trends, business systems apply new paradigms that are inevitable reflecting on management metasystems – quality assurance (QA), as well as on information technology (IT) metasystems. Small and medium enterprises (in particular in food industry) do not have possibilities to access external resources to the extent that could provide adequate keeping up with these trends. That raises the question how to enhance synergetic effect of interaction between existing QA and IT metasystems in order to overcome resource gap and achieve set goals by internal resources. The focus of this article is to propose a methodology for utilisation of potential of quality assurance document management system (QDMS) as prototypical platform for initiating, developing, testing and improving new functionalities that are required by IT as support for buiness system management. In that way QDMS plays a role of catalyst that not only accelerates but could also enhance selectivity of the reactions of QA and IT metasystems and direct them on finding new functionalities based on event-driven paradigm. The article tries to show the process of modelling, development and implementation of a possible approach to this problem through conceptual survey and practical solution in the food industry.     

How Firms Use Director Networks in Setting CEO Pay

We examine how firms use the network of overlapping directorships to determine chief executive officer (CEO) compensation. We contribute to related work by empirically exploring two competing hypotheses. In the first hypothesis, networks propagate relevant information used to establish good pay practices. In the second hypothesis, director networks are used opportunistically to benefit the CEO. The empirical findings are generally consistent with the first hypothesis. Yet, the importance of director networks is reduced when the CEO is entrenched and when management hires a compensation consultant. The latter finding is especially pronounced when director networks predict a reduction in CEO pay.     

Infant Firm Subsidization in Industries with Dynamic Structure

This paper analyzes time-consistent subsidies in industries with strong learning effects and frequent entry and exit. Structural dynamics create opportunities for strategic behavior: by influencing government policies, infant firms can reduce their tax burden and weaken future competitors. Two balanced-budget subsidy regimes are considered: (1) intra-industry redistribution; and (2) outside funding. We show that the choice of funding method does not affect equilibrium welfare. In both cases, the regulator is able to attain the constrained optimum. This result does not depend on the functional form of payoffs and holds in both price and quantity games. In linear-quadratic examples, we compute the equilibrium strategies. We show that (1) government intervention amplifies transitional price and output fluctuations and (2) the steady-state subsidy rate and infant production are decreasing in the speed of learning.      

Bounds for Ruin Probabilities in the Presence of Large Claims and their Comparison

Upper and lower bounds of ruin probabilities for the S. Andersen model with large claims are proposed. The bounds are stated in terms of the corresponding ladder height distribution and have a reasonable accuracy, which is illustrated by numerical examples. Comparison with other known bounds is given.     

Year-end and quarter-end effects in the term structure of sterling repo and Eurepo rates

Griffiths and Winters [Griffiths, M., Winters, D., 1997. On a preferred habitat for liquidity at the turn-of-the-year: evidence from the term-repo market, Journal of Financial Services Research 12, 21–38] find a year-end preferred habitat for liquidity for US repo rates, and, later [Griffiths, M., Winters, D., 2005. The-turn-of-the-year in money markets: tests of the riskshifting window dressing and preferred habitat hypotheses, Journal of Business 78, 1337–1364] find a similar preferred habitat for US money market instruments. Kotomin et al. [Kotomin, V., Smith, S., Winters, D., 2008. Preferred habitat for liquidity in international shortterm interest rates, Journal of Banking and Finance 32, 240–250] document the preferred habitat in LIBOR for the major world currencies, excluding the British pound. We examine the robustness of these results using pound sterling and euro repo rates and find a year-end preferred habitat for liquidity in the euro repo rates. The British interest rates continue to behave differently, and we provide a possible explanation as to why this occurs.