WAGE‐RISE CONTRACT AND QUANTITY COMPETITION WITH PROFIT‐MAXIMIZING AND LABOUR‐MANAGED FIRMS

This paper examines the behaviours of a profit‐maximizing firm and a labour‐managed profit‐per‐worker‐maximizing firm in a two‐stage quantity‐setting model with a wage‐rise contract as a strategic commitment. The paper then shows that there exists a unique equilibrium that coincides with the Stackelberg solution where the profit‐maximizing firm is the leader and the labour‐managed firm is the follower.     

Some aspects on regional integration,comparative advantage and consumer's diversity

This article describes one simple Cournot oligopoly model with linear inverse demand and international linkage, and tries to analyse how the degree of competitiveness, the diversity in comparative advantage, consumer preference and market volume are closely interrelated with each other in the course of free trade areas (FTA) liberalization. The influence of income/substitution effects to firm's profit maximization is also examined. My analysis shows some basic results and implications regarding the tariff-setting strategies and the incentive for endogenous internal liberalization, as well as the role of FTA formation on a stream to world-wide liberalization.     

A Two-stage Price-setting Equilibrium Designed in Consideration of Goods Relevance and Strategic Relevance

This paper analyses the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium of a two-stage price-setting duopoly. The demand functions are classified into four cases in terms of the goods' relevance and strategic relevance between two firms. All four cases are correlated with two opposite prior commitments that generate kinks in the reaction curve. This paper assumes that only one firm can execute the prior commitments. In the model, we find that the firm can increase its payoff with one of the prior commitments in each of the four cases. We also find that our equilibrium outcomes are different from those of Matsumura (1998) in this Journal, and that they occur at the Stackelberg point in all four cases if, and only if, the firm's reaction curves shift to the Stackelberg point as a result of the prior commitments. As a consequence, the effectiveness of strategic commitments is proved.     

Dynamics of quote and deal prices in the foreign exchange market

We empirically investigate price fluctuations of yen-dollar exchange rate using the high-frequency data recorded in the electronic broking system for seven-year period. The distribution of quote price changes has symmetric fat-tails approximated by a power law; however, that of deal price is asymmetrical. The autocorrelation function and diffusion of price changes indicate that quote price exhibits anti-correlation feature in short time scale, whereas deal price is essentially uncorrelated. The bid-ask spread shows power-law distribution and long range temporal correlations similar to that observed in absoute price changes.      

Explaining Foreign Holdings of Asia's Debt Securities: The Feldstein–Horioka Paradox Revisited*

In this paper, we find that home bias is still present in all economies and regions, especially in the case of short‐term debt securities, but that there are substantial variations among economies and regions in the strength of home bias, with the eurozone economies, the USA and developing Asia showing relatively weak home bias and advanced Asia, especially Japan, showing relatively strong home bias. We then examine trends over time in foreign holdings of debt securities and find that capital has been flowing from the USA and the eurozone economies to both advanced Asia (especially Japan) and developing Asia, and that foreign holdings of debt securities have been increasing in advanced as well as developing Asia but for different reasons. The main reason in the case of advanced Asia (especially Japan) appears to be higher risk‐adjusted returns, whereas the main reason in the case of developing Asia appears to be the growth of debt securities markets combined with relatively weak home bias and (in the case of short‐term securities) lower exchange rate volatility. Finally, we find that since the global financial crisis, foreign holdings of debt securities have declined (i.e. that home bias has strengthened) in all economies and regions except developing Asia, where they have increased (except for a temporary decline in 2008) but where their share is still much lower than the optimal share warranted by the capital asset pricing market model.     

Network motifs in an inter-firm network

Firms build business relationships during economic activities. The goal of this paper is to clarify production mechanisms and economic functions by identifying characteristic patterns of inter-firm interactions. In this paper, we empirically analyze an inter-firm network consisting of about one million firms and four million directed links, in order to specify network motifs, which are small subgraphs that occur more frequently than expected in a randomly generated network. We found that V-shaped triads are network motifs, while feedforward and feedback loop are anti-motifs. By defining roles in the subgraph according to structural equivalence, we also detected the significance profile of roles characterizing the industry sector. The taxonomy of industries obtained from the profiles is economically meaningful. These empirical findings may serve to provide an easily interpretable view of the entire inter-firm network and to improve the efficiency and safety of economic systems.     

Directional imbalance in transport prices and economic geography

This paper examines how and why transport prices become imbalanced with respect to the direction of shipments and how this affects economic geography. It is shown that the equilibrium transport price of the shipment in a particular direction is a nondecreasing function of the relative size of the embarkation region. Furthermore, we show that the directional imbalance in transport prices increases the likelihood of the symmetric pattern being stable and decreases the likelihood of the core-periphery patterns being sustainable. In short, the imbalance acts as a dispersion force.     

Random walk or a run. Market microstructure analysis of foreign exchange rate movements based on conditional probability

Using tick-by-tick data for the dollar–yen and euro–dollar exchange rates recorded on the actual transaction platform, a ‘run’—continuous increases or decreases in deal prices for the past several ticks—does have some predictable information on the direction of the next price movement. Deal price movements, that are consistent with order flows, tend to continue a run once it is started. Indeed, conditional probabilities of a run continuing in the same direction after several consecutive observations exceed 0.5. However, quote prices do not show such a run tendency. Hence, a random walk hypothesis is refuted in a simple test of a run using tick-by-tick data. In addition, a longer continuous increase of the price tends to be followed by a larger reversal. The findings suggest that those market participants who have access to real-time, tick-by-tick transaction data may have an advantage in predicting exchange rate movements. The findings reported here also lend support to the momentum trading strategy.     

Most-Favoured-Customer Pricing and Labour-Managed Oligopoly

This paper considers a price-setting oligopoly model in which labour-managed firms can offer retroactive most-favoured-customer policies as a strategic instrument. The purpose of the paper is to present the equilibrium of the labour-managed oligopoly model with most-favoured-customer pricing and show the effects of the most-favoured-customer policy.