Taxation of profits when there are profits

Profits taxes fall on both pure profits and the use of capital as an input. Simulations of a Cournot oligopoly suggest that gains from the former are not outweighed by losses from the latter.     

Measuring market power when firms price discriminate

We propose conduct parameter-based market power measures within a model of price discrimination, extending work by Hazledine (Econ Lett 93:413–420, 2006) and Kutlu (Econ Lett 117:540–543, 2012) to certain forms of second-degree price discrimination. We use our model to estimate the market power of US airlines in a price discrimination environment. We find that a slightly modified version of our original theoretical measure is positively related to market concentration. Moreover, on average, market power for high-end segment is greater than that of low-end segment.     

Taxation when Borrowing is Costly*

The implications for taxation theory of a life-cycle model of consumption incorporating financial transactions costs are derived The equity case for progressive taxation is shown to correspond in a life-cycle setting, to an efficiency case. Individuals prefer a progressive tax system to a proportional one because the tax burden is lower when they are young and face high transactions costs of borrowing. Similarly, an income tax is preferred to a consumption tax. Unlike earlier models based on liquidity constraints, the model presented here involves a financial sector consuming real resources. This permits analysis of the tax treatment of financial services in a consumption tax system. Exemption of financial services will generally be desirable.     

Quality uncertainty and time inconsistency in a durable good market

In a durable good monopoly where consumers cannot observe quality prior to purchase and product improvement occurs exogenously over time, I show that uncertainty in quality may resolve the time inconsistency problem (even for low levels of product improvement). Higher dispersion in quality creates greater demand for future product by increasing the incentive of buyers with inferior quality realizations to repeat purchase and this, in turn, reduces the incentive of the seller to cut future price. For various levels of product improvement, I characterize the range of quality uncertainty for which the market equilibrium is identical to one where the monopolist can credibly precommit to future prices. I also show that the presence of quality uncertainty can lead to no trading in the primary good market. Further, in contrast to the literature on the Coase conjecture, inability to precommit to future prices can reduce social welfare as a result of the market closure.     

Cycles and multiple equilibria in the market for durable lemons

Summary. The paper investigates the nature of market failure in a dynamic version of Akerlof (1970) where identical cohorts of a durable good enter the market over time. In the dynamic model, equilibria with qualitatively different properties emerge. Typically, in equilibria of the dynamic model, sellers with higher quality wait in order to sell and wait more than sellers of lower quality. The main result is that for any distribution of quality there exist an infinite number of cyclical equilibria where all goods are traded within a certain number of periods after entering the market. Received: December 21, 2000; revised version: September 5, 2001     

Equilibrium in a durable goods market with lumpy adjustment

Durable goods are an important component of the business cycle. Equilibrium models of durable goods markets are made difficult by the lumpy nature of individual purchases. We show that a straightforward approximation of the distribution of durable goods holdings gives rise to a tractable equilibrium model. We analyze the case of competition as well as that of a monopoly producer.     

New products and market competition

Using a novel data set on new product introductions in U.S. manufacturing, the paper studies the relationship between new product introductions and the intensity of market competition as it is measured by industry-specific price-cost margins. New product introductions intensify market competition and depress price-cost margins. These results draw significant empirical support from a sample of five U.S. manufacturing industries. A 10 percent increase in the number of new product introductions causes price-cost margins to drop by approximately 0.5 percent. Although price-cost margins appear procyclical with respect to fluctuations in industry sales, new products make price-cost margins less procyclical and therefore, the intensity of market competition more procyclical.The author would like to thank the Board of Research at Babson College for their generous financial support. The author would also like to thank Jane Cloran for assisting with some of the data. All of the remaining errors are the responsibility of the author.     

Taxation and market work: is Scandinavia an outlier?

This paper argues that it is essential to explicitly consider how the government spends tax revenues when assessing the effects of tax rates on aggregate hours of market work. Different forms of government spending imply different elasticities of hours of work with regard to tax rates. I illustrate the empirical importance of this point by addressing the issue of hours worked and tax rates in three sets of economies: the US, Continental Europe and Scandinavia. While tax rates are highest in Scandinavia, hours worked in Scandinavia are significantly higher than they are in Continental Europe. I argue that differences in the form of government spending can potentially account for this pattern. An early version of the paper was presented at the 2003 conference in honor of Prescott being award the Nemmers Prize in Economics, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. I have benefitted from the comments of numerous seminar participants, but would like to particularly thank Robert Lucas, Ed Prescott, and Nancy Stokey, as well as two anonymous referees, Stephen Parente and Anne Villamil for useful comments. I thank the NSF for financial support.     

Endogenous market power

In this paper we develop a framework to study markets with heterogeneous atomic traders. The competitive model is augmented as we provide traders with correct beliefs about their price impacts to define equilibrium with endogenously determined market power and show that such equilibrium exists in economies with smooth utility and cost functions and is generically determinate. Traders? price impacts depend positively on the convexity of preferences or cost functions of the trading partners and are subject to mutual reinforcement. Compared to the competitive model, the volume of trade is reduced, and hence is Pareto inefficient. The price effects of non-competitive trading depend on the convexity of marginal utility or cost function.     

Optimal Taxation when Consumers Have Endogenous Benchmark Levels of Consumption

I examine optimal taxes in an overlapping generations economy in which each consumer's utility depends on consumption relative to a weighted average of consumption by others (the benchmark level of consumption) as well as on the level of the consumer's own consumption. The socially optimal balanced growth path is characterized by the Modified Golden Rule and by a condition on the intergenerational allocation of consumption in each period. A competitive economy can be induced to attain the social optimum by a lump-sum pay-as-you-go social security system and a tax on capital income.     

Firm-specific cost savings and market power

Summary. We report a policy experiment that illustrates a potential problem of using historical pass-through rates as a means of predicting the competitive consequences of projected firm-specific cost savings in antitrust contexts, particularly in merger analysis. The effects of cost savings on welfare can vary vastly, depending on how the savings affect the industry supply schedule. In a capacity-constrained price-setting oligopoly, we observe that cost savings can overwhelm behaviorally salient market power incentives when the savings affect marginal (high cost) units. However, cost savings of the same magnitude on an infra-marginal unit leave market power unchanged.     

Efficiency and equilibrium when preferences are time-inconsistent

We consider an exchange economy with time-inconsistent consumers whose preferences are additively separable. If consumers have identical discount factors, then allocations that are Pareto efficient at the initial date are also renegotiation-proof. In an economy with a sequence of markets, competitive equilibria are Pareto efficient in this sense, and for generic endowments, only if preferences are locally homothetic.     

Downstream price-cap regulation and upstream market power

Under “partial separation,” it is increasingly common for a utility’s upstream affiliate (e.g., an electric generation supplier) to be unregulated while its downstream affiliate (e.g., the distribution company offering retail service) is subject to regulation. When choosing the optimal form of downstream regulation, regulators may be confronted with the potential exercise of market power by the upstream affiliate. This paper finds that the imposition of a downstream price cap with an appropriate profit-sharing rate can eliminate the upstream affiliate’s exercise of market power. However, it is less desirable to fully mitigate affiliate market power when upstream rivals also behave strategically.      

Organizational choices for efficiency and market power

We examine the role of strategic consideration in the choice of organizational structures characterizing large corporations. These considerations bridge the gap between the research on transaction costs and organizational forms and the research on strategic entry deterrence and threats. An illustrative model is presented and we derive propositions which look promising for providing empirical benchmarks.     

Planning under market socialism when iteration is incomplete

If an iterative planning procedure is cut short due to time shortage, the plan must be set subject to information gaps. But the nature of these gaps depends on which iterative procedure was used. For the case of Lange's model, Weitzman's “prices versus quantities” framework is redeveloped for the particular information gaps then found. With one good, the optimal quantity signal comes from the expected supply-demand intersection, but an optimal price signal lies between this intersection and the price from the last stage of iteration. When there are many goods, however, we cannot be so specific.     

Regulating collateral-requirements when markets are incomplete

In this paper we examine the effects of default and collateral on risk sharing. We assume that there is a large set of assets which all promise a risk less payoff but which distinguish themselves by their collateral requirements. In equilibrium agents default, the assets have different payoffs, and there are as many linearly independent assets available for trade as there are states of the world. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for equilibria to be Pareto-efficient in the presence of uncertainty. We explore some examples for which the collateral equilibrium allocation is identical to the Arrow–Debreu allocation, either when agents have a high preference for the durable good, or when the endowment distribution of the durable good is relatively homogeneous. We examine a series of examples to understand which collateral-levels prevail in equilibrium and under which conditions there is scope for regulating margin-requirements, that is, restricting the sets of tradable assets through government intervention. In these examples equilibrium is always sub-optimal but regulation never leads to a Pareto-improvement. While the competitive equilibria are constrained efficient, there do exist regulations which make large groups of agents in the economy better off. These regulations typically restrict all trades to take place in the low-collateral loans and benefit the poor and the rich agents in the economy through their effects on the equilibrium interest rate and the equilibrium prices of the durable goods.     

Resource-monotonic allocation when preferences are single-peaked

Summary. We consider the problem of allocating an infinitely divisible commodity among a group of agents with single-peaked preferences. Thomson (1994a), S?nmez (1994), and Moulin (1999) introduce three different resource-monotonicity conditions. In each characterization they derive, the axioms are independent. Under Pareto-optimality, the three resource-monotonicity conditions are equivalent. We investigate whether the interchange of these conditions still yields a valid characterization, and when the characterization still holds, whether it is a tight result or not. We strengthen each of the results, that is either the used resource-monotonicity condition can be replaced by a weaker one, or by using another resource-monotonicity condition, the result is not tight. Our main result is that when at least three agents are present, the class of fixed-path rationing methods is characterized by weak one-sided resource-monotonicity, strategy-proofness, and consistency. Received: April 24, 2000; revised version: April 10, 2001