Incomplete Regulation,Competition, and Entry in Increasing Returns to Scale Industries

The paper analyzes the effects of liberalization in increasing returns to scale industries. It determines the optimal regulation of an incumbent competing with an unregulated strategic competitor, when public funds are costly. The model reveals the trade‐off between productive and allocative efficiency. Moreover, the welfare gains from liberalization, as compared with regulated monopoly, are a nonmonotonic function of the cost of public funds. Finally, in the case of severe governmental cash constraints, incomplete regulation may dominate the full regulation of duopoly.     

Standard Tax Competition and Increasing Returns

The "race to the bottom" result of the standard tax competition literature implies that capital taxes are competed downward as capital becomes more mobile. The new economic geography literature, in contrast, finds that increasing capital mobility can be associated with a rise in capital tax rates, or a "race to the top." This paper derives the race to the top result from within the standard tax competition modeling framework augmented with agglomeration forces. When agglomeration forces are sufficiently strong, tax competition pressures are mitigated and capital taxes are instead driven by tax exporting incentives.     

Journey into the Unknown? Economic Consequences of Factor Market Integration under Increasing Returns to Scale

What are the dynamic consequences of comprehensive integration shocks? The answer to this question appears all but trivial. A dynamic macroeconomic model is set up of a small open economy with capital mobility, migration and increasing returns to scale. The model features multiple equilibria as well as (local and global) indeterminacy. Despite its simplicity, the model creates a rich set of plausible implications. This paper clarifies the mechanics that may lead an integrating economy to the good or to the bad equilibrium by showing how fundamentals and expectations interact in the process of equilibrium selection. The model is applied to replicate two striking empirical characteristics of macroeconomic development in East Germany since 1990.     

Increasing Returns, Learning, and Beneficial Tax Competition

We analyze the welfare impact of entrepreneur mobility in a two‐country overlapping generations model. Increasing returns in production yield multiple equilibria that are stable under adaptive learning. Governments compete for the mobile resource by setting income taxes. We show that large welfare gains can arise from noncooperative taxation. If expectational barriers prevent the realization of high output equilibria, tax competition can sufficiently perturb expectations so that high steady states become attainable. Once in a high production regime, governments may institute cooperative tax increases or reductions so as to bring the economy to the global joint optimum without disturbing the regime.     

Monopolistic Competition, Increasing Returns and International Coordination of Entry Policy

This paper presents a new model of monopolistic competition in which firms produce differentiated products under decreasing costs. This model is used to confirm and illustrate the limitations of the excess entry hypothesis, well known in the literature on industrial organization. The validity of the theorem is limited in the sense that it fails to hold in the present model if the properly defined degree of love for variety is sufficiently large. The model is extended to allow for intraindustry trade and to examine the conditions for gains (or losses) from trade in a two-country framework. It is shown how the degree of love for variety affects them. The significance and nature of international coordination of competition policy in the present setting is considered. The degree of love for variety is again shown to be of crucial importance in the characterization of the optimal policy coordination.     

A New Dynamic Trade Model of Increasing Returns and Monopolistic Competition

This paper formulates a two‐country by two‐factor by two‐good dynamic Chamberlin–Heckscher–Ohlin model of international trade with endogenous time preferences. After proving the existence, uniqueness and local saddle‐point stability of the steady state, we examine the relationship between initial factor endowment and trade patterns in the steady state. It will be shown that (i) given that the representative household in each country supplies an equal amount of labor, only intra‐industry trade occurs in the steady state and (ii) other things being equal, the country with higher labor efficiency becomes the net exporter of the labor‐intensive good.     

Growth Effects of Free Trade under Increasing Returns

This paper addresses the long-term sustainability of the growth effects from trade, within the context of a dynamic optimization model where the investment sector exhibits an initial phase of increasing returns. It is proved that the qualitative properties of trade and growth remain valid, even for decreasing, rather than constant, returns to scale in the consumption sector. That is, trade enables an economy to escape a "poverty trap" and enjoy unbounded growth. Moreover, the asymptotic long-run growth rate of the optimal consumption levels with trade is determined, establishing that trade has a beneficial effect on long-run growth.
JEL Classification Numbers: O41, F12.     

Cost Sharing under Increasing Returns: A Comparison of Simple Mechanisms

A technology with decreasing marginal costs is used by agents with equal rights. Each agent demands a quantity of output and costs are divided by means of a fixed formula. Several such mechanisms are compared for the existence of Nash equilibrium demand profiles and for the equity properties of these equilibria. Among three mechanisms, average cost pricing, the Shapley–Shubik cost sharing, and serial cost-sharing, only the latter two possess at least one Nash equilibrium on a reasonable domain of individual preferences. Only the serial cost sharing equilibria pass the equity tests of No Envy and Stand Alone cost.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C72, D63.     

Increasing Returns and International Trade

The paper develops a model of international trade with increasing returns toscale by taking into account the possibility of cooperation among agents in an egalitarian economy. It is shown that each country gains from trade in a trading world in which there are arbitrary numbers of increasing-returns-to-scale goods, constant-returns-to-scale goods, factors of production, and countries.     

Growth Dynamics and Returns to Scale: Bifurcation Analysis

We investigate the dependence of the dynamic behavior of an endogenous growth model on the degree of returns to scale. We focus on a simple (but representative) growth model with publicly funded inventive activity. We show that constant returns to reproducible factors (the leading case in the endogenous growth literature) is a bifurcation point, and that it has the characteristics of a transcritical bifurcation. The bifurcation involves the boundary of the state space, making it difficult to formally verify this classification. For a special case, we provide a transformation that allows formal classification by existing methods. We discuss the new methods that would be needed for formal verification of transcriticality in a broader class of models. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: O41, O30.     

Excess Returns in Electric Utility Mergers During Transition to Competition

A standard event methodology is used to evaluate recent electric utility mergers as the industry moves to competitive generation markets. Statistically significant effects were focused on the day before the announcement and the day of the announcement, and were fairly small, although statistically significant. Shareholders perceive very little merger benefits occurring in a highly competitive generation sector. Markets reacted more positively to the gas/electric mergers, indicating stockholder appreciation for opportunities for scope economies. U.S. acquirers suffered no significant wealth losses in mergers with British and Australian utilities.     

On the Equivalence of Two Concepts of Returns to Scale

We examine the relationship between two widely used concepts of returns to scale at different levels of analysis. We show that while their weak global versions are equivalent, the strict global versions are not so. Versions at a given input vector are never equivalent, which invalidates a result by Ide and Takayama (1987).     

Aggregate Fluctuations with National and International Returns to Scale*

Cyclical movements in aggregate output, factor inputs, and productivity are all positively correlated across countries. This article proposes a model in which positive cross‐country correlations of these variables result from increasing returns to the world‐wide variety of intermediate goods even if technology shocks are purely country‐specific. The model also accounts for the observed positive relationship between bilateral trade volume and international comovements. Positive comovements can also arise with constant returns to variety, but only if technology shocks are themselves strongly correlated. The combination of constant returns and common shocks, however, tends to generate procyclical fluctuations of the trade balance.     

Returns to Scale in the Australian Life Insurance Industry*

This paper seeks evidence of economies of scale for superannuation, ordinary and total business of a sample of 38 Australian insurance companies. It was motivated by the work of Rutledge and Tuckwell, but in contrast to their results, significant evidence, of economies is found.     

International Trade with Increasing Returns in the Transportation Sector

In this general equilibrium framework, the transportation sector is modeled as a distinct sector with increasing returns. A more advanced technology has a higher fixed cost but a lower marginal cost of production. Even with both manufacturing finns and transportation firms engaged in oligopolistic competition and optimally choosing their technologies, the model is tractable and results are derived analytically. Technology adoptions in the manufacturing sector and transportation sector are reinforcing, and multiple equilibria may exist. Firms choose more advanced technologies and the prices decrease when the size of the population is larger.