Is the Retail Gasoline Market Local or National?

This paper studies the effect of station density on prices in the retail gasoline market in the Czech Republic. We estimate the impact of the number of competing stations in various driving-distance ranges around each station on prices. We find that station density has a negative effect on prices; the effect decreases with distance and is statistically significant up to six kilometers. This suggests that the retail gasoline market is local rather than national.     

Regulation of Labour Markets in the European Union

EU regulation of labour markets under the Social Charter and Protocol to improve 'employment rights' may appear loudable but can prove costly for firms. Mandates will probably make the unskilled more difficult to employ.     

Making the ‘Invisible’ Visible: Redevelopment‐induced Displacement of Migrants in Shenzhen,China

Gentrification in China is intertwined with urban redevelopment, which causes the large‐scale displacement of rural–urban migrants from ‘villages in the city’ (ViCs). Because of the informality of ViCs, migrant renters have very insecure tenancy and during redevelopment they are treated as a negligible (‘invisible’) social group. As they are very difficult to locate after displacement, they are also literally invisible to researchers. To make the invisible visible, this study traced a sample of displaced migrants from Huangbeiling village in Shenzhen. The focus was on the displacement process and on identifying the consequences for the displaced. We found various forms of displacement during the redevelopment process. Nearby ViCs were prioritized by displaced migrants to minimize as much utility loss as possible. However, they generally suffer from decreased proximity, increased living costs, and the loss of social networks and job opportunities. Remarkably, some choose to return to the gentrifying village, enduring displacement in situ caused by increasing rents, drastic physical neighbourhood changes and declining liveability, in exchange for retaining their original social and economic networks. Large‐scale urban redevelopment is causing the rapid shrinkage of informal housing. Recognizing and addressing the housing needs of this impoverished social group is a matter of urgency.     

The Borneo company limited: origins of a nineteenth-century networked multinational

The origins of British-based trading companies are to be found in the international mercantile networks which linked together Britain's commercial centres with the rest of the world during the nineteenth century. One such network, drawing together participants with operations in Singapore and Sarawak, was formalized under the title of The Borneo Company Limited (BCL) between 1851 and 1856. To function effectively, these inter-personal networks of merchants required a high degree of trustworthiness among the participants in order to overcome principal/agent problems, since direct supervision from the headquarters in London was not feasible. However, in order to expand, it was necessary to widen the circle of network participants and to incorporate new types of competence. This contribution analyses the early history of BCL with a view to understanding the way in which the process of growth was managed, distinguishing between three different types of expansion: engaging in production as well as trade; extending the geographical scope of the organization; and diversifying into new markets.     

Pricing European Options by Numerical Replication: Quadratic Programming with Constraints

The paper considers a regression approach to pricing European options in an incomplete market. The algorithm replicates an option by a portfolio consisting of the underlying security and a risk-free bond. We apply linear regression framework and quadratic programming with linear constraints (input = sample paths of underlying security; output = table of option prices as a function of time and price of the underlying security). We populate the model with historical prices of the underlying security (possibly massaged to the present volatility) or with Monte Carlo simulated prices. Risk neutral processes or probabilities are not needed in this framework.     

Impulse and diffusion in the study of technical change

A common model of innovation diffusion is extended to incorporate the interaction of demand growth and capacity growth, building in part on work by Kuznets and Burns on industrial growth and retardation. It is shown how price and production cost evolve during a diffusion process, and how Schumpeter's theory of the transient nature of innovator's profits has a natural place within the analysis of diffusion. The framework is intended to assist future analysis of the links between the diffusion and the evolution of a given technology, taking account of, eg, learning by doing, production bottlenecks and the inducement to innovation, and producer/adopter interaction to improve technological performance.     

Financial prediction with constrained tail risk

A new class of asymmetric loss functions derived from the least absolute deviations or least squares loss with a constraint on the mean of one tail of the residual error distribution, is introduced for analyzing financial data. Motivated by risk management principles, the primary intent is to provide “cautious” forecasts under uncertainty. The net effect on fitted models is to shape the residuals so that on average only a prespecified proportion of predictions tend to fall above or below a desired threshold. The loss functions are reformulated as objective functions in the context of parameter estimation for linear regression models, and it is demonstrated how optimization can be implemented via linear programming. The method is a competitor of quantile regression, but is more flexible and broader in scope. An application is illustrated on prediction of NDX and SPX index returns data, while controlling the magnitude of a fraction of worst losses.     

Decomposing Local: A Conjoint Analysis of Locally Produced Foods

Increasingly, foods are marketed as "locally grown." We use stated preference data from a choice-based conjoint instrument to address two issues surrounding consumer demand for locally produced goods: (1) what is the geographical extent of "local," and (2) is the value consumers place on "local" production distinct from other factors that are often confounded with locally produced foods such as farm size and product freshness? We find our subjects place similar value on products produced "in state" and "nearby" and that consumers' willingness to pay for local production is independent from values associated with product freshness and farm size.