Idiosyncratic Risk of House Prices: Evidence from 26 Million Home Sales

This paper uses about 26 million home sales to measure house price idiosyncratic risk for 7,580 U.S. zip codes during three periods: (1) when the U.S. housing market was stable (1996–2000), (2) booming (2001–2007) and (3) busting (2007–2012), and investigates the determinants of house price risk. We find very strong relationships between risk and some basic housing market characteristics. There is a U‐shaped relationship between risk and zip‐code level median household income; risk is higher in zip codes with more appreciation volatility; and risk is not compensated with higher appreciation.     

The Economic Impact of Anticipated House Price Changes—Evidence from Home Sales

If realized house prices have the wealth effect and the collateral effect on the economy, anticipated house price changes should have similar economic effects. This article empirically analyzes the effects of single‐family home sales, which are shown to be able to predict house prices in the literature, on economic production, using 372 metropolitan statistic areas in the United States from the first quarter of 1981 to the second quarter of 2008 in a panel vector error correction model. Changes in home sales are found to Granger because the growth rate of per‐capita gross metropolitan product and the dynamic effects are visualized with impulse response functions. Supporting evidence for the economic impact of home sales is also found in contemporaneous regressions.     

Retail Mergers and Food Prices: Evidence from France

This paper analyzes the impact of a merger in the French supermarket industry on food prices. Using consumer panel data, we compare the changes in prices for merging and rival firms in affected and comparison markets. We use a novel definition of affected markets when some firms have a local pricing strategy and others a more centralized pricing strategy. We find that prices increase significantly following the merger, and that the merging firms lose market shares. For the rivals, the price increases are larger in local markets, in which concentration increased and differentiation changed after the merger.     

Entry and Prices: Evidence from the Supermarket Sector

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect on prices of the entry of a large supermarket into a given location. We use a panel with data from fifteen cities in Chile for the period 1998:I–2004:IV. We correct for the potential simultaneity problem derived from the fact that entry can be a response to price differentials. We find that the entry of a hypermarket to a given city reduces relative prices in that local market by 7–11%. Most interestingly, we also find that part of this effect takes place the year before the supermarket actually opens for business.      

Auction versus Negotiated Sale: Evidence from Real Estate Sales

We offer a theoretical and empirical comparison of auctions and negotiated sales. We first build a simple model to show that auctions generate a higher relative price than negotiated sales when demand for the asset is strong, when the asset is more homogeneous and when the asset attracts buyers with higher valuations. Using data from property sales in Singapore, we find support for our theoretical predictions. In addition, we find that auctions do not necessarily generate a higher price premium for foreclosed properties than for nonforeclosed properties.     

The Effect of Historic District Designation on Single-Family Home Prices

The designation and regulation of local historic districts in Baltimore, Maryland started in 1964. Structures within these districts are required to maintain exteriors in the style of the historical significance of the neighborhoods. Prior studies in other cities have shown that the designation did not always lead to an increase in restoration activities in these areas. This paper analyzes the effect of the designation on transaction prices and finds historic districts do have higher prices than identical non-historic districts.     

Public-Private Partnerships and Prices: Evidence from Water Distribution in France

We use an original database of 5000 French local public authorities to explore the impact of organizational choice and performance as measured by consumer prices. In quantifying the impact of the choice of public-private partnerships (PPPs) on performance, we consider the related issue of the determinants of organizational choice. We estimate a switching regressions model to account for the endogeneity of organizational choice, and find that in our sample, (i) the choice by local public authorities to engage in a PPP is not random, and (ii) conditional on the choice of a PPP, consumer prices are significantly higher on average.     

Prices and Price Dispersion on the Web: Evidence from the Online Book Industry

Using data collected between August, 1999, and January, 2000, covering 399 books, we examine pricing by thirty-two online United States-based bookstores. At the aggregate level, we find that both advertising and competitive structure had the predicted effects. More competition led to lower prices and to lower price dispersion. Holding competitive structure constant, more widely advertised items also had lower prices. At the firm level, we observe considerable heterogeneity in behavior. Firms had differentiated (or attempted to differentiate) on dimensions such as brand, price, and selection.     

The Effects of Megamergers on Efficiency and Prices: Evidence from a Bank Profit Function

This paper examines the efficiency and price effects of mergers by applying a frontier profit function to data on bank megamergers. We find that merged banks experience a statistically significant 16 percentage point average increase in profit efficiency rank relative to other large banks. Most of the improvement is from increasing revenues, including a shift in outputs from securities to loans, a higher-valued product. Improvements were greatest for the banks with the lowest efficiencies prior to merging, who therefore had the greatest capacity for improvement. By comparison, the effects on profits from merger-related changes in prices were found to be very small.     

The Effects of the Interstate Commerce Act on Transport Costs: Evidence from Wheat Prices

There is significant debate over the effect of the Interstate Commerce Act (ICA) on the cost of rail transport to shippers. Taking price differences across locations as proxy for transport costs, we use data on wheat prices before and after the implementation of the ICA to see if the Act led to smaller differences in wheat prices across American cities relative to a control group of European cities. We find that the ICA had no effect on US transport costs; however, it reduced their volatility substantially. This evidence supports the view that the ICA helped stabilize cartel prices after a period of significant price wars.     

Using Revenue Sharing to Implement Flexible Prices: Evidence from Movie Exhibition Contracts

Movie exhibition contracts entail revenue‐sharing terms that go down with weeks since release. We develop a simple model to show how the form of these contracts can be explained by the distributors’ desire to set flexible prices. We then use detailed data on theater‐movie contracts in Spain, where we exploit the information available at the time of contracting for movies previously released in the U.S., and other movie and theater characteristics, to show how the implications of our flexible pricing argument are supported in the data, and differentiate our explanation from prior, more standard risk‐sharing and moral‐hazard explanations.     

Empirical Evidence on the Impact of Reserve Prices in English Auctions

We study the impact of reserve prices on the revenue of English auctions using a unique hand‐collected database of virtual football players from the online football management game Hattrick. As theoretically predicted, setting a reserve price entails a trade‐off between the cost of setting it too high and having the good go unsold, and the benefit associated with a higher revenue should the reserve price successfully extract surplus from the highest bidder. Overall, we find the net benefit of setting a higher reserve price to be negative, regardless of the value of the reserve price. This is a novel result insofar as previous literature has generally found an insignificant or positive effect of the reserve price on unconditional auction revenue.     

电力服务营销初探

一、服务营销理念及其发展改革开放初期，随着市场经济的发育，市场营销思想被引入中国并得到了广泛传播，对中国社会主义市场经济的发展和企业在竞争中的成长起到了积极的推动作用。但无庸讳言，受传统观念、经济体制、人员素质等因素的影响，市场营销思想在中国的形成与发展过程是渐进的。在电力企业中，市场导向意识、顾客导向意识至今还没有得到足够的重视，以市场、顾客为导向的战略发展、市场营销机制尚未完全建立起来。近年来，在发达国家发展得如火如荼的服务营销思想，对电力企业来说更是新鲜事物，还未能与传统的市场营销思想一样…     

The Long-Run Relationship between House Prices and Income: Evidence from Local Housing Markets

Many in the housing literature argue that house prices and income are cointegrated. I show that the data do not support this view. Standard tests using 27 years of national-level data do not find evidence of cointegration. However, standard tests for cointegration have low power, especially in small samples. I use panel-data tests for cointegration that are more powerful than their time-series counterparts to test for cointegration in a panel of 95 metro areas over 23 years. Using a bootstrap approach to allow for cross-correlations in city-level house-price shocks, I show that even these more powerful tests do not reject the hypothesis of no cointegration. Thus the error-correction specification for house prices and income commonly found in the literature may be inappropriate.     

Economic Policy Uncertainty and House Prices: Evidence from Geographical Regions of England and Wales

This article empirically investigates the effect of the economic policy uncertainty on house prices across 10 different geographical regions of England and Wales. The empirical study is conducted by means of the autoregressive distributed lag bounds cointegration test. Results show a stable long‐run relationship (cointegration) between house prices and its determinants (including economic policy uncertainty) in nine of the regions. Results also evince long‐ and short‐term negative effect of uncertainty to house prices. These results clearly indicate the importance of economic policy uncertainty in the determination of UK house prices and demand.     

The Effect of Mortgage Payment Reduction on Default: Evidence from the Home Affordable Refinance Program

This article evaluates the effect of payment reduction on mortgage default within the context of the Home Affordable Refinance Program. We find that mortgage default is sensitive to payment reduction using univariate, duration and hazard modeling approaches. A relative risk Cox model of default with time‐varying covariates estimates that a 10% reduction in mortgage payment is associated with about a 10–11% reduction in monthly default hazard for loans. This finding is robust to the inclusion of empirically important mortgage risk drivers (such as current loan‐to‐value and FICO score) as well as controlling for selection effects based on observables.     

Service Regulations,Input Prices and Export Volumes: Evidence from a Panel of Manufacturing Firms

Using a panel of firm‐level data from Spanish manufacturers, this study shows that better service regulation reduces the price of intermediate inputs paid by downstream firms. The beneficial cost effects of services reforms extend to both large and small‐to‐medium sized corporations (SME’s), but the former tend to enjoy greater gains. This feature also manifests itself in international markets. We find evidence of an input cost channel through which service regulations affect the volume of exports of large manufacturers, while the evidence of such a channel is weaker for SME’s. Our estimates indicate that, from 1991 to 2007, large firms increased their volume of exports by an average of 20 per cent as a result of the direct input cost effect of services reforms, such that the firms that benefited the most typically belonged to industries more dependent on service inputs. Furthermore, convergence to the ‘best practice’ regulatory framework in services would have raised exports at least by an additional nine per cent. We conclude that firm size is relevant for the connection between services reforms, intermediate input prices and export volumes.     

The Role and Determinants of Concession Sales in Movie Theaters: Evidence from the Spanish Exhibition Industry

The importance of concession sales in the movie exhibition industry is widely acknowledged among economists and other social scientists that have studied this industry in the past. Despite this recognition, the lack of appropriate data has constrained existing studies that document the role that concessions play in movie theaters. Using detailed weekly movie theater data on concession sales, box office revenues and transaction characteristics from a major exhibitor in Spain, we shed light on the relation between concession sales and the following factors (i) theater attendance, (ii) non-traditional channels of ticket distribution, (iii) audience composition, and (iv) theater and market specific factors.      

New Firms' Survival and Market Turbulence: New Evidence from Spain

The availability of longitudinal data for individual firms has allowed the improvementof the existing knowledge on market structure dynamics. We present additional evidence through the analysis of a cohort of Spanish manufacturing firms. Our results confirm some basic empirical findings obtained in studies for other countries. According to the behavior of the cohort we study, Gibrat's Law does not hold for new entrants. Patterns of market turbulence vary considerably according to the type of industry. The behavior of new firms seems to fit the learning model. The estimation of a hazard function demonstrates that the main regularities affecting the likelihood of survival of young firms are quite similar in different types of countries.     

The Effect of Sales Force Adoption on New Product Selling Performance

Although several studies have suggested that the sales force is a major contributing factor to new product success, few studies have focused on new product adoption by the sales force, particularly with respect to its relationship with selling performance. The present article presents empirical evidence on the impact of sales force adoption on selling performance. We defined sales force adoption as the combination of the degree to which salespeople accept and internalize the goals of the new product (i.e., commitment) and the extent to which they work hard to achieve those goals (i.e., effort). It was hypothesized that the impact of sales force adoption on selling performance will be contingent on supervisory factors (sales controls, internal marketing of the new product, training, trust, and supervisor's field attention), and market volatility. Therefore, this article also provides evidence of the conditions under which sales force adoption of a new product is more or less effective in engendering successful selling performance. The hypothesized relationships were tested with data provided by 97 high technology firms from The Netherlands. The results show that sales force adoption is positively related to selling performance. This finding suggests that salespeople who simultaneously exhibit commitment and effort will achieve higher levels of new product selling performance. Outcome based control, internal marketing and market volatility are also positively related to new product selling performance. The effect of sales force adoption on selling performance is stronger where outcome based control is used and where the firm provides information on the background of the new product to salespeople through internal marketing. Training and field attention weaken the adoption‐performance linkage. These findings may indicate that salespeople in The Netherlands interpret training as “micromanaging” and field attention as “looking over their shoulder.” We conclude with implications of our study for research and managerial practice.