Subsidy competition and imperfect labor markets

This study presents a two‐country model of subsidy competition for manufacturing firms under labor market imperfections. Because subsidies affect the distribution of firms, subsidies influence unemployment rates and welfare in both countries. We show that when labor market frictions are high, subsidy competition is beneficial, although subsidies under subsidy competition are inefficiently high. In the coordinated equilibrium, the supranational authority provides a subsidy to firms that equal the expected total search costs, which increases the number of firms relative to laissez‐faire and improves welfare relative to laissez‐faire and subsidy competition. Finally, we find that a rise in a country's labor market frictions raises the equilibrium subsidy rate, affects unemployment rates, and lowers welfare.     

A One-Factor Conditionally Linear Commodity Pricing Model under Partial Information

A one-factor asset pricing model with an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process as its state variable is studied under partial information: the mean-reverting level and the mean-reverting speed parameters are modeled as hidden/unobservable stochastic variables. No-arbitrage pricing formulas for derivative securities written on a liquid asset and exponential utility indifference pricing formulas for derivative securities written on an illiquid asset are presented. Moreover, a conditionally linear filtering result is introduced to compute the pricing/hedging formulas and the Bayesian estimators of the hidden variables.     

日本经济起飞时期农村劳动力供给机制研究

20世纪60年代,伴随着日本经济起飞,城市加工产业对劳动力的需求急剧扩大,在城乡巨大收入差距的诱惑下,日本农村的青壮年劳动力大量涌入城市,造成农村劳动力严重短缺,在农户家庭内部劳动力互补机制的作用下,缓解了劳动力不足,在一定程度上稳定了农业生产.从分析日本经济起飞时期农村劳动力的结构变动入手,通过实证分析把握劳动力供给结构变化的经济影响;进而分析未来日本劳动力供给结构变化的趋势,在此基础上结合中国的实际情况说明农村劳动力互补机制对于城市化进程中中国农村的借鉴意义.     

Is Downward Wage Flexibility the Primary Factor of Japan's Prolonged Deflation?

By using both macro‐ and micro‐level data, this paper investigates how wages and prices evolved during Japan's lost two decades. We find that downward nominal wage rigidity was present in Japan until the late 1990s, but disappeared after 1998 as annual wages became downwardly flexible. Moreover, nominal wage flexibility may have contributed to Japan's relatively low unemployment rates. Although macro‐level movements in nominal wages and prices seemed to be synchronized, such synchronicity is not observed at the industry level. Therefore, wage deflation does not seem to be a primary factor of Japan's prolonged deflation.     

Estimating cellphone providers' customer equity

This paper provides insights about how customer equity estimates can help businesses monitor the competition as well as aid managers in making their marketing investment decisions, and how companies can employ their marketing investments to maximize current and future yield/returns. The article concerns itself with the current offer of cellphone providers and their main products. The research includes survey data through interviews with 302 cellphone users of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The study uses this data combined with a number of economic assumptions and a financial marketing model to create an insight in customer equity values of cellphone providers in the region. The scenario dated October 2005 is that the estimated customer equity of the service provider Vivo is, respectively, 93 and 91% larger than those of competing providers Claro and TIM. The research underlines that on average the customer equity flowing from the post-paid segment is 3.5 times larger than that of the pre-paid. In addition to these results the study provides the customer lifetime value (CLV) estimates for Claro's, TIM's and Vivo's pre- and post-paid customers and analyzes the retention and loss figures of CLV. Also a discussion follows of the implications that these values will likely have for the companies' marketing strategy.     

Characterizing belief-free review-strategy equilibrium payoffs under conditional independence

This paper proposes and studies a tractable subset of Nash equilibria, belief-free review-strategy equilibria, in repeated games with private monitoring. The payoff set of this class of equilibria is characterized in the limit as the discount factor converges to one for games where players observe statistically independent signals. As an application, we develop a simple sufficient condition for the existence of asymptotically efficient equilibria, and establish a folk theorem for N-player prisoner?s dilemma. All these results are robust to a perturbation of the signal distribution, and hence remain true even under almost-independent monitoring.     

The effect of collaboration network on inventors' job match,productivity and tenure

It has been argued in the economic literature that job search through informal job networks improves the employer–employee match quality. This paper argues that inventors' research collaboration networks reduce the uncertainty of firms about the match qualities of inventors prior to hiring. We estimate the effect of inventors' collaboration networks on their productivity and mobility using the U.S. patent application database. It is found that networked inventors are more productive and have longer tenure than non-networked inventors. The evidence from fixed-effect regressions shows that the higher productivity and longer tenure of networked inventors are not solely attributable to unobserved ability of inventors or unobserved characteristics of firms. These results are consistent with the job match hypothesis between inventors and firms through their collaboration networks.     

Belief changes and expectation heterogeneity in buy- and sell-side professionals in the Japanese stock market

We document the determinants of the expectation heterogeneity of stock price forecasters on TOPIX. Monthly panel data collected by QUICK Corporation in the Nikkei Group via surveys is utilized in the process. We examine the determinants of expectation heterogeneity by categorizing our sample into buy-side and sell-side professionals and demonstrate that the co-existence of different types of professionals contributes to the expectation heterogeneity. We show that buy-side and the sell-side professionals, who possess different business goals, differentiate the information contents as well as their interpretations of the same information in their forecasts, contributing to the expectation heterogeneity. In addition, we investigate the interactive expectation formulation of buy-side and sell-side professionals and find that buy-side professionals incorporate the sell side's ideas regarding future stock prices into their own forecasts, but refer exclusively to their own ideas when relating foreign exchange rates to future stock prices. Meanwhile, sell-side professionals tend to utilize buy-side professionals' ideas about future prices in order to improve their research and ingratiate themselves to their clients, that is, to the buy-side professionals. We demonstrate that this interactive expectation formulation also contributes to the generation of the expectation heterogeneity.     

Extensions of linear diagonal-parameter symmetry and quasi-symmetry models for cumulative probabilities in square contingency tables

For square contingency tables with ordered categories, CAUSSINUS [Annales de la Faculté des Sciences de l'Université de Toulouse (1965) Vol. 29, pp. 77–182] and AGRESTI [Statistics and Probability Letters (1983) Vol. 1, pp. 313–316] considered the quasi-symmetry and the linear diagonal-parameter symmetry models, respectively, which have multiplicative forms for cell probabilities. This paper proposes two kinds of models that have the similar multiplicative forms for cumulative probabilities that an observation will fall in row (column) category i or below and column (row) category j (> i ) or above. The endometrial cancer data are analyzed using these models.