Pricing in Segmented Markets, Arbitrage Barriers, and the Law of One Price: Evidence from the European Car Market

The paper uses micro‐level price data from the European car market to examine why there are deviations from the law of one price. The absolute law of one price is strongly rejected, but there is convergence to its relative version. Two sets of explanations are considered: (i) price‐setting in segmented markets, and (ii) arbitrage barriers. Overall, the determinants of arbitrage costs have more explanatory power. The single most important factor is the distance between markets. Evidence for Belgium and Luxembourg suggests that a single currency lowers price differences significantly.     

Diversification Bias and the Law of One Price: An Experiment on Index Mutual Funds

Individual investors select high-fee index mutual funds despite the fact that the future payouts are nearly identical. The authors offer an explanation for this violation of the law of one price based on investor desire to diversify. While diversification in some settings may be beneficial, in the case of assets with identical payouts, fee minimization is the only rational strategy. The evidence confirms that investors diversify by selecting multiple higher fee funds rather than minimizing fees when investing in index mutual funds.     

Exchange Rate Uncertainty and the Law of One Price

This paper develops a framework for analyzing the impact of exchange rate uncertainty on the Law of One Price. Using the prices of very disaggregated, homogeneous products in a very open economy, Chile, where no institutions exist for hedging exchange risk, it then tests the model in a bivariate GARCH in mean context. Little evidence is found that short-run exchange rate uncertainty consititutes a barrier to goods arbitrage.     

The Law of One Price: further empirical evidence concerning Italy and the United Kingdom

The main purpose of this paper is to perform a disaggregated test on the empirical validity of the Law-of-one-price Hypothesis in the sector of manufacturing for two industrial countries, Italy and the United Kingdom, during the period 1973–80. The findings show that Italian export prices are much less related to British export prices than is usually suggested by contemporary balance-of-payments and exchange rate theoretical literature assuming the Law of One Price.     

The Law of One Price—A Case Study

We use retail transaction prices for a multinational retailer to examine the extent and permanence of violations of the law of one price. For identical products, we find typical deviations of 20–50 percent, with some evidence for convergence over time. Such differences might be due to differences in local costs. If so, relative prices of similar products (round versus square mirrors) should be equal across countries. In fact, relative prices vary significantly across very similar goods within a product group. The finding suggests that differences in local distribution costs, local taxes, and probably tariffs do not explain the price pattern, leaving strategic pricing or other factors resulting in varying markups as alternative explanations.
JEL classification : F 41; L 11     

The Law of One Price: A Canada/U.S. exploration

The paper examines whether arbitrage tends to equalize commodity prices for internationally traded homogenous products. It also investigates whether the increasing integration of North American markets has reduced price differences over time, and tests the validity of the so-called Law of One Price. We find that price differences for homogenous tradables between Canada and the U.S. are smaller than those for differentiated tradables and non-tradables, and are statistically insignificant over the period 1985 to 1999. We find no support for the notion that the increasing integration of North American markets due to trade liberalization has reduced price differences between Canada and the United States. Instead, the shifts in the price differences (expressed in the same currency) generally reflected fluctuations in the exchange rate. Canadian prices adapt with a lag to U.S. price changes that are brought about by changes in the exchange rate.     

Cyclicality, Mortality, and the Value of Time: The Case of Coffee Price Fluctuations and Child Survival in Colombia

Recent studies demonstrate procyclical mortality in wealthy countries, but there are reasons to expect a countercyclical relationship in developing nations. We investigate how child survival in Colombia responds to fluctuations in world Arabica coffee prices - and document starkly procyclical child deaths. In studying this result's behavioral underpinnings, we highlight that: (1) The leading determinants of child health are inexpensive but require considerable time, and (2) As the value of time declines with falling coffee prices, so does the relative price of health. We find a variety of direct evidence consistent with the primacy of time in child health production.     

Regionalization, public spending and growth: a stylized model dealing with ‘predatory states’

In this paper, a micro-founded model analyzing the effects of ‘regionalization’ on economic activity is developed. It shows that the spatial division of public competencies can have an impact on the growth rate via the efficiency of governmental choices: initially advantageous for weak levels, decentralization (/reduction of regional size) becomes limited due to the risk of underestimation of the real profitability of public expenditure by local governments (non-internalized cross-border effects). In accordance with the theory, a transversal estimation for a sample of 51 countries for the 1990s establishes a ‘bell-shaped’ relation between indicators of regionalization and the quality of governance.     

Innovation and Competition: The Role of Finance Constraints in a Duopoly Case

In this paper we analyse the role of financial resources in a process of competition interpreted as a continuous restructuring of productive capacities. Financial constraints appear an essential means of co-ordination. Co-ordination with the environment where this process of restructuring takes place for the process itself to be viable and co-ordination between firms for the survival of competition.     

互联网时代:一个最好与最坏兼容的时代

在移动互联网、大数据、云计算等科技不断发展的背景下,"互联网思维"已经引起了各行各业人员的关注。结合公司实际,就如何在管理会计中运用互联网思维提出思考,并从"互动思维、大数据思维、跨界思维"三方面,尝试与管理会计相结合、展开探讨。研究对明确公司会计改革与发展方向、提升管理会计水平具有重要价值。研究认为,公司需要专业能力强、综合知识丰富、沟通能力强的财务管理人才,这是向管理会计转型的应有之义,同时也是切合互联网思维的要求。     

Small-Group,Multi-Level Democracy: Implications of Austrian Public Choice for Governance Structure

This paper examines the process of mass democracy as the fundamental cause of transfer seeking and the centralization of governance, using Austrian-school theory and methodology such as decentralized knowledge, disaggregated phenomena, and the structure of capital goods. The alternative of decentralized, small-group governance reduces the demand for campaign financing and makes more effective use of decentralized knowledge. In addition, when public revenues originate in the local districts and are passed on to higher levels of governance, it provides incentives for revenue sources which do not have an excess burden on production. The governance structure of cellular, bottom-up, multi-level voting, with public revenue flowing up from the lower to the upper levels, provides a contrast for a comparative systems analysis that can yield insight into the transfer seeking endemic in mass democracy.     

美国合并反垄断法律规制的范式转型

20世纪70年代中期以前,美国合并反垄断法律规制的理论和实践深受民粹主义和共和主义等思想的影响,将价值目标定位在维护经济民主上,进而保护创业者以及"小商人"的独立地位。20世纪70年代以后,美国合并反垄断法律规制的重心从政治、社会领域更多地转移到国家经济和经济效率方面,并最终促成美国合并反垄断法律规制的范式转型。     

The Case of the Missing Organizations: Co-operatives and the Textbooks

The author discusses the following seven issues affecting assessment of undergraduates in universities: decisionmaking and the selection of tests, the use of written and oral assignments to measure learning, the characteristics of grades and portfolios for evaluating students, opportunities for self-assessment and feedback to instructors, retention of learning and the testing for higher-ordered thinking, the psychology of students in the economics classroom, and the development of new tests as public goods. The author suggests ways that economics faculty can add new dimensions to their assessment practices, improve their understanding of assessment choices, use assessment to enhance the quality of student thinking, and conduct research studies on assessment questions.     

The Interdependence Between Private and Constitutional Law: a Comment on the Grady & McGuire' Paper

After having summarized the paper by Grady & McGuire, one of their central conjectures, namely that inequality is necessary and sufficient for the emergence of efficient private law is discussed. It is argued that due to inequality, rulers have incentives to discriminate between subjects. Thus, their interests might very well diverge from those of many subjects with regard to private law. It is further argued that political transaction costs and path dependence should be taken explicitly into account when explaining the development of private law. The present author concludes that the approach taken by Grady & McGuire is compatible with that of public choice, although they aim to criticize the public choice approach.     

专利法利益平衡机制的法经济学解析——基于社会契约论的观点

现有文献对专利法中具体权利限制制度的研究,难以使我们从整体上把握专利法利益平衡原则的作用机制.而从社会契约论的视角着眼,专利法利益平衡机制可归结为信息公开-权利专有的对价关系.运用法经济学原理进行的分析表明,契约对价通过专利长度和专利宽度两个法律变量的变化协调双方的利益关系.分析结果进一步指出专利契约在实践中面临价值缺失的危险,提出在契约订立过程中引入博弈机制是重构专利契约的关键.     

Institutions in the economy and some institutions of mainstream economics: From the late 1970s to the 2008 financial and economic crisis

This article proposes a conceptual and theoretical institutional approach to the relations between the economy and economics and uses it to examine, through a structured survey of the literature, the relations between institutions in the economy and the institutions of mainstream economics, macroeconomics, and financial economics, highlighting issues related to the financial and macroeconomic crisis and focusing on the United States from the late 1970s to 2008. Institutions are socially shared systems of rules of behavior or of thought. Some systems of mental and behavioral rules are socially shared among economic agents and policymakers in part because they are socially shared among academic economists. They may exert on economic agents and policymakers some of the same types of influence they have on economists. On the other hand, there are important limits to the influence of the institutions of economics outside academia, and institutions in the economy also influence the institutions of economics.     

The Role of Culture,Historicity, and Human Agency in the Evolution of the State: A Case Against Cultural Fatalism

I examine how the nature of the state and its relationship to its people are determined and evolve. I bring together differing contributions of traditional institutionalism to further an emerging evolutionary-institutionalist discourse concerning the role played by culture and historicity, on one hand, and by individual actions and awareness, on the other, in shaping and reshaping the nature of the state. Such discourse is significant in understanding that, although inherited culture plays an important role in influencing the character of the state in a given society, the future of the state is not fully determined by its history. In equal measure, it depends on the volition of individuals who purposefully amend the state’s institutions through rearranging power distribution. Using Russia’s authoritarian state as a case in point, I demonstrate how this emerging evolutionary-institutionalist discourse can circumvent ideological misuse of the institutionalist paradigm in non-democratic societies.     

Joint Profit Maximization,Negotiation, and the Determinacy of Price in Bilateral Monopoly

Many economists teach that joint profit maximization leads to a determinate quantity and indeterminate price of the intermediate good traded. Using isoprofit curves, the Truetts argue that only one price is consistent with rational behavior and the goal of profit maximization.