Measuring efficiency when competitive prices aggregate differences in product quality and risk

In perfectly competitive markets with homogenous goods, prices aggregate inputs and outputs into a money metric that allows production plans and, hence, firms to be ranked by their profitability. Standard techniques of efficiency measurement use this metric to estimate cost and profit frontiers that identify “best-practice” production, conditioned on these exogenous prices. However, when prices vary due to differences among firms in the quality of outputs and inputs and in how asymmetric informational problems are resolved, both quality and the production of information can be decision variables of the firm, and prices will have endogenous components linked to production decisions. For example, in banking, prices of financial inputs and outputs are linked to credit quality and, hence, to risk and, thus, aggregate both inputs and outputs and their risk characteristics as well as reflect how informational asymmetries in credit markets are ameliorated. This paper argues that these cases pose two serious problems for the standard techniques of efficiency measurement: (1) they underestimate inefficiency because, in conditioning on prices, they fail to account for the effects of suboptimal pricing strategies on profitability; and (2) in ignoring how production plans and pricing strategies affect market-priced risk, the standard techniques neglect the effects of different pricing strategies on the discount rate, on expected profit and, hence, on market value. Two alternative techniques that do not condition their frontiers on prices and that account for risk are described to show how they measure the efficiency of different pricing strategies as well as production plans. These two alternative models for measuring efficiency are employed to study how differences in pricing strategies affect the efficiency and market value of highest-level bank holding companies in the United States in 1994.     

A monotonicity law for relative prices

Summary It is shown that relative prices of production, which depend on the rate of profit in a complicated manner, satisfy nevertheless a simple monotonicity law when the Hilbert's projective metric is used as a measure.     

Imaginary money against sticky relative prices

This paper considers price setting in pure units of account, linked to the means of payment through managed parities. If prices are sticky in the units in which they are set, parity changes may facilitate equilibrium adjustment of relative prices. The paper derives simultaneously the optimal choice of unit of account by each price setter, and the optimal parity policy. The gains from having multiple units of account are computed for a simple calibrated economy.     

Estimating entrants' productivity when prices are unobserved

Entrant firms are constrained to set lower price–cost markups than incumbents due to idiosyncratic demand shocks faced in the startup phase. Productivity indices suffer from micro-level markup variation and underestimate entrants' productivity, when productivity is measured by nominal sales and expenditures but not quantities. This study makes the first attempt to estimate entrants' productivity by controlling for their markup difference, when prices or quantities are unobserved at the firm-level. The econometric methodology introduces demand side into a structural model of production to account for the price variation. The estimation routine deals with the endogeneity due to unobserved productivity using a control function approach, and retrieves average markups for entrants and incumbents together with a markup-adjusted productivity index. My findings show that entrants set on average lower markups than incumbents in Japanese manufacturing. When productivity is adjusted to markups, entrants are as productive as incumbents, while the standard measures of labor and total factor productivity indicate low productivity for entrant firms.     

Inflation,relative prices and their skewness

This note gives a few practical guidelines for cointegration analysis. The focus is on testing the cointegration rank in a VAR model and on how an intercept and a trend should be incorporated in the testing model. Only two cases appear relevant for most economic data.     

Measuring national economic performance without using prices

Recent years have seen increasing awareness of the deficiencies of conventionally defined national income as a measure of a nation's overall economic performance. Alternative measures have been proposed involving either the modification of national income accounting conventions, or the abandonment of national income itself in favour of something such as the Genuine Progress Indicator, GPI. However, such alternatives, like national income itself, all involve the use of monetary valuation for aggregation. This paper proposes a new approach to the measurement of national economic performance, which follows naturally from ecological economics as the study of economic activity rooted in a proper appreciation of its material circumstances, and which does not involve using prices for aggregation. The paper gives some results for three variants of the new approach, and compares and discusses them. While this new approach does not purport to provide a single definitive assessment of the sustainability of current economic activity, which is an infeasible goal, it could provide useful inputs to relevant research activity, and to policy analysis and debate.     

Inflation,relative prices and household saving behavior

This article contains tests for the direct effects of inflation on household saving. Empirical results with cross-country data from five OECD countries indicate that both unanticipated and anticipated inflation affect the household savings ratio. This latter result, which furthermore turns out to be robust in terms of aggregation and additional variables, is clearly at variance with some previous analyses, particularly those of Deaton.     

When is growth pro-poor? Evidence from a panel of countries

Growth is pro-poor if the poverty measure of interest falls. According to this definition there are three potential sources of pro-poor growth: (a) a high growth rate of average incomes; (b) a high sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes; and (c) a poverty-reducing pattern of growth in relative incomes. I empirically decompose changes in poverty in a sample of developing countries during the 1980s and 1990s into these three components. In the medium- to long-run, most of the variation in changes in poverty can be attributed to growth in average incomes, suggesting that policies and institutions that promote broad-based growth should be central to the pro-poor growth agenda. Most of the remainder of the variation in changes in poverty is due to poverty-reducing patterns of growth in relative incomes, rather than differences in the sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes. Cross-country evidence provides relatively little guidance as to the policies and institutions that promote these other sources of pro-poor growth.     

Inflation and relative prices: A decomposition analysis

The variability of relative prices is decomposed into a component due to real effects (technical change, real income growth and so on) and a component due to inflation. Using quarterly Australian data, inflation is shown to account for 24 percent of the total relative price variability.     

Manufacturing consumption,relative prices,and productivity

I study the patterns of manufacturing consumption expenditures across a broad set of countries that differ in their level of development using disaggregated expenditure and price data. The relative price of manufacturing tends to decline with income and the real share rises with income, particularly for countries in the top half of the income distribution. I find that the nominal expenditure share of manufacturing displays a hump-shape pattern with respect to the level of income per capita. I document that the income elasticities of the relative price of individual manufacturing categories lie in a wide range. However, since most categories have a negative elasticity, the average elasticity for manufacturing is negative. In addition, most aggregations of individual categories, regardless of the criteria used, yield manufacturing sub-sectors that feature a negative income elasticity of its relative price and the variation across income in nominal expenditure shares tends to mask a larger variation across income in real shares. Using a standard development accounting framework, I report large differences in productivity across countries for manufacturing categories. I also find some differences in productivity across countries for manufacturing sub-sectors, but these differences are smaller than the differences between manufacturing and services and considerably smaller than the differences across individual manufacturing categories.     

Movements of relative agricultural prices in sub-Saharan Africa

Movements of relative agricultural prices in 20 countries insub-Saharan Africa between 1973 and 1999-95 are investigated.Changes in the net barter terms of trade of the agriculturalsector are compared with international terms of trade movements.Movements in prices received by cocoa, coffee, cotton and teafarmers are compared with unit export prices and with indicatorsof production costs. World price movements for the same commoditiesare compared with unit export prices of major exporting countries.A similar analysis is undertaken for cereals, where producerprices are compared with unit import prices and with cost indicators.Possible factors which affect these relative price movementsare discussed with special emphasis on the role of alternativepolicy regimes. Empirical findings suggest that conventionalviews on the anti-farmer bias of African policies till the 1980sare questionable and the recent liberalisation of agriculturalmarkets in Africa have not generated farmer-friendly outcomes.     

Money and the dispersion of relative prices revisited

This study investigates the diffusion of two early Information technologies across 1348 institutions of higher education: (1) the adoption of Because It's Time Network (BITNET), a precursor to the Internet as we know it today and (2) the adoption of the Domain Name System (DNS) with its registration of domain names, an essential feature of the modern Internet. We find that the time paths of adoption for both generally exhibit the typical S shape found for other innovations. We identify factors likely responsible for the patterns observed and in the process extend the scope of the diffusion literature by incorporating insights from the optimization behaviour of nonprofits. Using a proportional hazards framework, we find that faster adoption occurred among institutions focused on research and doctoral education as well as among select liberal arts colleges relative to nonselect colleges. Faster adoption also occurred for larger institutions, suggesting that they benefited from economies of scale. Adoption was slower for institutions having a larger percent of female faculty members. Also, there is some evidence to suggest that public institutions were faster to innovate than private institutions, while institutions in the South tended to innovate more slowly than institutions located in other regions of the country.     

Measuring the impact of crime on house prices

This paper uses data on over 2800 house sales in Jacksonville, FL to estimate the impact of crime on house prices. A GIS programme is used to develop neighbourhood characteristics that are unique to each observation. Crime data, available for 89 police beats are assigned to each observation. Weighting the seriousness of offences by the cost of crime to victims is used as an alternative to the customary measures of the number of index crimes. The cost of crime has virtually no impact on house prices overall, but homes are highly discounted in high crime areas.     

Explaining Italy's economic growth: A balance-of-payments approach with internal and external imbalances and non-neutral relative prices

Thirlwall's Law (Thirlwall, 1979) considers that growth can be constrained by the balance-of-payments when the current account is in permanent deficit. The law focuses on external imbalances as impediments to growth and does not consider the case where internal imbalances emerging from budget deficits or public debt can also constrain growth. The recent European public debt crisis of peripheral countries (including Italy) shows that when internal imbalances are out of control they can constrain growth and domestic demand in a severe way. Recently, Soukiazis et al. (2013) developed a model – henceforth the SCA model – that takes into account both internal and external imbalances and where relative prices are not neutral in the pace of economic growth. The SCA model proved to be accurate in explaining economic growth in Portugal. The aim of the present paper is to apply the SCA model to Italy and check its precision for explaining the growth path in this country. Italy is an interesting case study of a larger economy with a lack of growth in the last decade facing serious internal imbalances caused by high deficit and public debt. Our empirical analysis shows that Italy grew at a slower rate than its potential capacity due to supply constraints. Policies designed at increasing external competitiveness and lowering the costs of financing the economy are shown to be effective strategies to achieve higher growth.     

On using relative prices to measure capital-specific technological progress

Recently, Greenwood, Hercowitz and Krusell (GHK) have identified the relative price of (new) capital with capital-specific technological progress. In a two-sector growth model, however, the relative price of capital equals the ratio of the productivity processes in the two sectors. Restrictions from this model are used with data on wages and prices to construct measures of productivity growth and test the GHK identification, which is easily rejected by the data. This raises questions about various measures of the contribution that capital-specific technological progress might make to the economy. This identification also induces a negative correlation between the resulting measures of capital-specific and economy-wide technological change, which potentially explains why papers employing this identification find that capital-specific technological change accelerated in the mid-1970s. We impose structure on the productivity measures based on their long-run behavior and find evidence of a slowdown in productivity in the 1970s that is common to both sectors and an acceleration in the mid-1990s that is exclusive to the capital sector.     

The quest for pro-poor and inclusive growth: the role of governance

This paper analyses the role of good governance in fostering pro-poor and inclusive growth. Using a sample of 112 countries over 1975–2012, it shows that growth is generally pro-poor. However, growth has not been inclusive, as illustrated by a decline in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. While all features of good governance support income growth and reduce poverty, only government effectiveness and the rule of law are found to enhance inclusive growth. The investigation of the determinants of pro-poor and inclusive growth highlights that education, infrastructure improvement, and financial development are the key factors in poverty reduction and inclusive growth. Relying on the panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) model, the paper identifies a nonlinear relationship between governance and pro-poor growth, while the impact of governance on inclusive growth appears to be linear.     

Quotas and equilibrium relative prices in the trade restricting country

This paper is concerned with the effects of international trade restriction through quotas. It is shown that a casual relationship exists between the fraction of licences distributed domestically, the terms of trade, and the domestic relative price of the importable.     

Inflation and relative prices: A system–wide approach

The paper introduces a system-wide model for the analysis of the effects of inflation on relative prices. This enables the identification of those commodities whose relative prices are distorted by inflation. The model provides measures of the natural rate of relative price variability, which is associated with zero inflation, and the inflation rate which minimizes relative price variability. An illustrative application with Australian data is provided.     

国内外能源相对价格与中国的能源效率

提高能源效率是实现经济可持续发展和减少污染排放的根本途径。基于非线性平滑转换模型的分析显示,能源价格对能源效率的影响机制存在非线性的平滑转换。机制转换的主要引导因素是国内外能源价格指数的相对变化,机制转换的阈值近似为1。目前我国能源价格对能源效率的影响比较接近高效机制运行,增强能源价格的灵活性,可以实现能源消费者的自我选择,是提高我国能源效率的可行选择。