Classical Economics and the Problem of Exhaustible Resources

In this paper we discuss in terms of the simple model of exhaustible resources proposed by Bidard and Erreygers some of their propositions. The concept of ‘real rate of profit’ introduced by them is shown to be of no analytical use. It is stressed that the mathematical properties of the economic system under consideration are independent of the numeraire adopted. The classical treatment of exhaustible resources in terms of differential rent is shown to be correct under well‐defined conditions. It is argued that it is complementary to, rather than incompatible with, the approach which emphasizes that in conditions of free competition the rate of profit obtained by conserving the resource equals that in production processes.     

Can Islamic banks have their own benchmark?

This paper attempts to answer whether Islamic banks can have their own benchmark rate. In so doing, the paper investigates the nature of the relationship Islamic interbank benchmark rate (IIBR) and its comparable conventional counterpart, London interbank offer rate (LIBOR). The dynamics of the two series are investigated to examine the stability of the spread between IIBR and LIBOR, referred to as ‘Islamic premium’ or ‘piety premium’. The findings suggest that there are both long-term and short-term dynamic relationships between the two rates providing significant evidence of their convergence and co-movement. Our results also show that the existence of the IIBR-LIBOR spread is a reflection of the cost of funding and profit potential of the participating IIBR rate-setters. We find that, in addition to the determinants of the credit spreads, fundamental news of the panel banks are dominant factors driving the ‘piety premium’. We argue that the Islamic banking industry is operating in a global context, where it is highly improbable that its rates can decouple from the global benchmarks. Given that Islamic banking products and their risk return profile are similar to conventional products, arbitrage activities force Islamic rates to converge with the global benchmark rates.     

STOLPER–SAMUELSON REVISITED: TRADE AND DISTRIBUTION WITH OLIGOPOLISTIC PROFITS

This paper investigates the distributional impact of international trade when goods markets are oligopolistic and firms partially pass‐through changes in tariffs into prices and factor costs for differentiated products. Trade liberalization raises mark‐ups and profit shares in the export industry and lowers them in the import‐competing industry, while Stolper–Samuelson effects on real prices of primary factors are attenuated or possibly reversed. An extended model shows how ‘offshoring’ (trade in intermediate goods) can potentially increase mark‐ups for oligopolistic producers of final goods. The analysis illuminates why business interests generally support trade liberalization policies today, regardless of their countries' factor abundance.     

A disequilibrium analysis of the monetary trade model

This paper examines the monetary approach to the balance of payments under fixed exchange rates when domestic prices and wage rates are not fully flexible. This leads to a formulation in the spirit of a ‘disequilibrium analysis’. We analyze alternatively the cases where the prices of nontraded goods or the nominal wage rate are treated as state variables along with the stock of money. The properties of these systems are analyzed from the point of view of the momentary equilibrium and of the dynamic adjustment process.     

Trade pattern reversals in time-phased Ricardian systems and intertemporal efficiency

A timeless Ricardian system specializes geographically to minimize localized labor, just as a timeless neoclassical system specializes to minimize primary factor totals (in a vectoral sense). The steady states of a time-phased system, for zero interest or profit rate, similarly specialize to minimize primary factors. By contrast, when there is a positive interest rate, the observed steady states do not minimize primary totals. Thus, positive profit rates make a system superficially appear inefficient, much like systems with distorting taxes. However, from an intertemporal efficiency standpoint, which goes beyond steady states, it is shown that so long as the profit rates are geographically equal, the observed steady state is Pareto efficient, not Pareto inefficient. In contrast to the Emmanuel view that profit equalization leads to ‘unequal exchange’ and deadweight loss from trade, deadweight loss is shown to come from the absence of international lending markets. The present paper illustrates these truths, works out implications for factor-price equalization or nonequalization, gives conditions of trade equilibrium for time-phased systems, shows their multiplicity, and the possible Metcalfe-Steedman ‘instability’ from the standpoint of the global correspondence principle. A factor-price frontier is deduced, which gives the negative interest rate as a quasi-concave function of the real returns (in terms of any good) of the primary factors, and its well-behaved quantities dual is contrasted with the actual ill-behaved steady-state quantity relation.     

Endogenous norms in wage and price setting and hysteresis in the real exchange rate

Real exchange rates are often ‘disconnected’ from fundamentals. Mean reversion toward equilibrium operates at a slow pace (if it operates at all), and when inflation is low the real exchange rate tracks closely the nominal exchange rate for prolonged periods of time. Using a simple open economy model, we show that including endogenous norms in wage and price setting in an open economy set‐up can lead to hysteresis in the real exchange rate. For a given set of fundamentals, the real exchange rate may settle down at different equilibria and exchange rate policies are not necessarily neutral in the long‐run.     

Dissecting the PPP puzzle: the unconventional roles of nominal exchange rate and price adjustments

The conventional view, as expounded by sticky-price models, is that price adjustment determines the PPP reversion rate. This study examines the mechanism by which PPP deviations are corrected. Nominal exchange rate adjustment, not price adjustment, is shown to be the key engine governing the speed of PPP convergence. Moreover, nominal exchange rates are found to converge much more slowly than prices. With the reversion being driven primarily by nominal exchange rates, real exchange rates also revert at a slower rate than prices, as identified by the PPP puzzle [J. Econ. Lit. 34 (1996) 647].     

Compete in Price or Service?—A Study of Personalized Pricing and Money Back Guarantees

Retailers use both pricing and service strategies to respond to intensified competition. Here we develop a duopoly model to investigate the impact of the increasingly popular personalized pricing strategy (PPS) and the widely used Money Back Guarantee (MBG) customer returns policy. We consider two retailers who differ in customer satisfaction rates. Each retailer chooses a pricing strategy, PPS or uniform pricing, and a product return strategy, MBG or ‘no returns.’ We show that both PPS and MBG are dominant strategies, but their impact on retailers’ prices and profits are different; while PPS intensifies price competition and may lead to a prisoner’s dilemma in which both retailers may lose profit, MBG mitigates price competition and may result in a Pareto improvement in both retailers’ profits. Both PPS and MBG increase the size of the overall market, but not the total duopoly profit. The total customer surplus and social welfare may increase under either strategy. In addition, we obtain some interesting observations as to how our results may change if the product quality/customer satisfaction rate is endogenously chosen in the duopoly. Some of our findings are in contrast to related results reported in the literature.     

Why Does the Problem Persist? ‘Rational Rigidity’ and the Plight of Japanese Banks

One of the most perplexing factors in the Japanese financial crisis is the apparently non‐optimal and non‐rational behaviour of Japanese banks. We provide a “rational” explanation for bank behaviour based on a theory of community banking that incorporates Japanese institutional characteristics. We find three implications of community banking – a low lending rate, a low bankruptcy rate, and in particular, institutionalisation of ‘rational rigidity’ (an institutional pledge of no profit maximisation) – in Japanese banks. We argue that this type of banking is viable as long as the economy expands and asset prices go up, which was the case before the asset‐market crash in 1990. The stagnation and free‐fall of asset prices in the 1990s exerted tremendous pressure on Japanese banks but did not paralyse them completely in the 1990s, although there are indications that they failed to restructure distressed large corporations in some sectors, notably real estate. Thus, the problem is not that paralysed banks are blocking recovery, but that their current institutionalised rigidity in banking practices is no longer viable because private enterprises in the market economy are suffering from asset‐price deflation and economic stagnation.     

ENVIRONMENTAL TAXES,RELATIVE PRICES AND CHOICE OF TECHNIQUE IN A LINEAR MODEL OF PRODUCTION

A classical model of production is used to study the effects of environmental taxes on relative prices and on the choice of technique. It is shown that a taxation of energy inputs can induce cost-minimizing producers to switch to a technique that requires more total energy. An explanation for such a ‘perverse’ substitution is provided by showing that with a positive rate of profits the relative prices of (relatively) energy-intensive products can be higher with a higher tax rate.     

ARBITRAGE IN SECURITIES MARKETS WITH SHORT-SALES CONSTRAINTS

In this paper we derive the implications of the absence of arbitrage in securities markets models where traded securities are subject to short-sales constraints and where the borrowing and lending rates differ. We show that a securities price system is arbitrage free if and only if there exists a numeraire and an equivalent probability measure for which the normalized (by the numeraire) price processes of traded securities are supermartingales. Also, the tightest arbitrage bounds that can be inferred on the price of a contingent claim without knowing agents'preferences are equal to its largest and smallest expected normalized payoff with respect to the supermartingale measures. In the case where the underlying security price follows a diffusion process and where short selling is possible but costly, we derive partial differential equations that must be satisfied by the arbitrage bounds on derivative securities prices, and we determine optimal hedging strategies. We compute the arbitrage bounds on common securities numerically for several values of the borrowing and short-selling costs and show that they can be quite sharp.     

NUMERAIRE,SAVINGS AND THE INSTABILITY OF A COMPETITIVE EQUILIBRIUM

This paper addresses the stability of a multimarket competitive equilibrium. The dependence of stability on the choice of the numeraire is clarified. The traditional tâtonnement pricing is revised in order to satisfy some basic features of economic behaviour. Well‐known conditions for local stability are proved to be insufficient if a market for credit is introduced alongside the markets of dated commodities. Stability depends not only on the slopes of the demand and supply curves, but also on equilibrium prices. This result emerges without the occurrence of capital perversities, such as reswitching and reverse capital deepening.     

Optimal retail sales strategies for old and new products in monopoly and horizontal competition scenarios

Advances in technology have made product updates more frequent and allowed consumers to choose different versions of the same product based on their preferences. It is crucial for retailers to understand how to formulate optimal sales strategies based on those different consumer preferences. To this end, we develop game models that consider the heterogeneity of consumer preferences under both monopoly and horizontal competition scenarios and perform the sensitivity analysis to examine the impact of consumer proportions and consumer preferences on retailers’ sales strategies. The results show that (i) regardless of competition or monopoly status, the original retailer can always maximize profit by setting prices based on the market share of traditional consumers, as long as the retailer sells both new and old versions of the product; (ii) the greater the competitive advantage of the competitor, the more advantageous the hybrid sales mode; (iii) if the price of the old product is below a certain threshold, there will be a positive profit for the original retailer when selling both the old and new products; and (iv) when consumer acceptance of competing retailers is lower, entering the retail market is not a good choice for competing retailers.     

衡量房价合理回归标准的思考

房价合理回归就是要通过对房价的调控使其回到合理水平,它体现了中央政府对房价调控的决心和信心,反映了城镇居民的心声和期待。判断房价是否合理回归,一看房价是否与城镇居民收入相适应;二看房价是否与成本和合理利润相匹配。要促进房价合理回归,必须坚持房价调控政策不动摇,巩固房价调控成果;努力降低商品住房成本,制止开发商暴利行为;理顺收入分配关系,增加城镇居民收入;加大保障性住房建设力度,构建住房保障体系;抑制住房投机需求,维护市场秩序,以实现房价调控目标。     

Recurrence: A Neglected Aspect of the Sraffian Critique of Marginalism

The significance of ‘reswitching’—that great symbolic issue of the Cambridge capital debates—has sometimes been denied on the ground of a low probability. This article investigates the industry‐level return, in different equilibria, of the use of one or more (or all) inputs. Such phenomena, which we call ‘recurrence’, are generically far more probable than the return of a whole economy‐level technique and can be triggered, not only by a change in the interest rate, but also by a change in relative primary input prices. Since recurrence alone, without reswitching, is damaging to standard marginalist conceptions, one should not attribute too much importance to any low ‘probability of reswitching’.     

INFLATION AND THE TIMING OF PRICE CHANGES (*)

Consider an oligopolistic industry in which the firms produce perfect substitutes and incur transaction costs of changing price. Under constant inflation, there is an equilibrium in which the firms change their nominal prices at equally spaced time-points. Increasing the inflation rate increases the size of price changes, increases the frequency of price changes, and increases the average real price paid by buyers. The analysis derives its significance from its implications for the welfare costs of inflation: the inflation-induced distortions in relative prices are larger the more sticky nominal prices are; and are larger the greater the tendency for firms to stagger (rather than synchronize) their price changes.     

Persistent real exchange rates

Three well known facts that characterize exchange rate data are: (a) the high correlation between bilateral nominal and real exchange rates; (b) the high degree of persistence in real exchange rate movements; and (c) the high volatility of real exchange rates. This paper attempts a joint, albeit partial, rationalization of these facts in an environment with no staggered contracts and where prices are preset for only one quarter. There are two key innovations in the paper. First, we augment a standard two-country open economy model with learning-by-doing in production at the firm level. This induces monopolistically competitive firms to endogeneize the productivity effect of their price setting behavior. Specifically, firms endogenously choose not to adjust prices by the full proportion of a positive monetary shock in order to take advantage of the productivity benefits of higher production. Second, we introduce habits in leisure. This makes the labor supply decision dynamic and adds an additional source of propagation. We show that the calibrated model can quantitatively reproduce significant fractions of the aforementioned facts. Moreover, as in the data, the model also produces a positive correlation between the terms of trade and the nominal exchange rate.     

2011年房地产政策调控成效评价及2012年市场预测

中国房地产调控目标已由"遏制房价过快上涨"升级为"促进房价合理回归",在归纳2011年住房市场主要运行特征的基础上,引入协调度匹配指数模型对2001年～2011年中国住房价格是否达到"合理回归"进行了评价,并从影响住房市场的需求、供给及调控政策三个方面,对2012年中国住房市场运行趋势进行了预测。     

Exports versus multinational production under nominal uncertainty

This paper examines how nominal uncertainty affects the choice that firms face to serve a foreign market through exports or to produce abroad as a multinational. I develop a two-country, stochastic general equilibrium model in which firms make production and pricing decisions in advance, and I consider its implications for the relative attractiveness of exporting and multinational production. I find that when multinational sales are priced in the local currency while exports are priced in the producer currency, destination volatility benefits exporters: during a foreign nominal contraction, the foreign exchange rate appreciates, causing exports to be relatively cheaper. Exporters gain non-linearly through demand, making profit convex in prices. As foreign volatility rises, the model implies that the home country should serve the foreign country relatively more through exports. I take this implication to bilateral U.S. data, using inflation volatility as a proxy for nominal volatility. Using sectoral data on sales by majority-owned foreign affiliates matched with U.S. exports, I find that higher inflation volatility is associated with a significantly lower ratio of multinational sales to total foreign sales.     

Exports versus multinational production under nominal uncertainty

This paper examines how nominal uncertainty affects the choice that firms face to serve a foreign market through exports or to produce abroad as a multinational. I develop a two-country, stochastic general equilibrium model in which firms make production and pricing decisions in advance, and I consider its implications for the relative attractiveness of exporting and multinational production. I find that when multinational sales are priced in the local currency while exports are priced in the producer currency, destination volatility benefits exporters: during a foreign nominal contraction, the foreign exchange rate appreciates, causing exports to be relatively cheaper. Exporters gain non-linearly through demand, making profit convex in prices. As foreign volatility rises, the model implies that the home country should serve the foreign country relatively more through exports. I take this implication to bilateral U.S. data, using inflation volatility as a proxy for nominal volatility. Using sectoral data on sales by majority-owned foreign affiliates matched with U.S. exports, I find that higher inflation volatility is associated with a significantly lower ratio of multinational sales to total foreign sales.