The Electricity Contract Market in England and Wales

In England and Wales, wholesale electricity is sold in a spot market partly covered by long-term contracts which hedge the spot price. Two dominant conventional generators can raise spot prices well above marginal costs, and this is profitable in the absence of contracts. If fully hedged, however, the generators lose their incentive to raise prices above marginal costs. Competition in the contract market could lead the generators to sell contracts for much of their output. Since privatisation the generators have indeed covered most of their sales in the contract market.     

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.     

Catch Animal Spirits in Auction: Evidence from New Zealand Property Market

Following the animal spirits theory proposed by Akerlof and Shiller, this article contributes to behavior economics by investigating the possibility of using auction sales data to capture evidence of irrational exuberance in the housing market. Using the monthly percentages of residential property auction sales for Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch regions in New Zealand from 2006 to 2015, and the exuberance testing method proposed by Phillips, Shi and Yu, we find that animal spirits have been developing in the Auckland housing market since 2013, but not in other regions. When compared to the results based on price‐to‐rent ratios, auction sales provide more meaningful results for identifying market‐wide irrational exuberance at an early stage. The causality test on price‐to‐rent ratios and auction sales volume shows that asset prices and animal spirits influence each other in the short run. In the long run, prices have significant effect on animal spirits, but not vice versa.     

Immigration and Access to Fringe Benefits: Evidence from the Tobacco Use Supplements

We examine the extent to which assimilation and residential ethnic enclaves are associated with immigrant access to smoking‐related fringe benefits. In particular, we consider access to office smoking bans and employer‐sponsored smoking cessation programs. We first document differences in access to these benefits between immigrant and native workers. Second, we show that assimilation is positively associated with smoking‐related fringe benefit access while enclave residence does not predict access. These findings broaden our understanding of immigrant employment.     

Hispanic Immigration and Labor Market Segmentation

This paper investigates the wage and employment effects of Hispanic immigration on native-born, low-skilled urban workers. The study develops a multiquation model to counter simultaneity bias, isolates the impact of recent illegal aliens from that of settled immigrants and of native interstate movers, calculates separate estimates for female and male employees, subdivided by race and Spanish origin, and tests both conventional and dual labor market theories. The results indicate that recent immigration has not had substantial adverse wage or employment effects.     

Property taxes and rental housing: Evidence from China

We investigate the effect of property taxes on households’ rental income by exploiting regional variations in the introduction of property taxes in China in 2011. Using the propensity score matching combined with a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the rental income of households in pilot areas significantly increased after 2011. Hence, homeowners tend to shift the potential property tax burden to tenants. Additionally, this positive effect is driven by the extensive margin, rather than the intensive margin. Our finding is robust to various alternative specifications and subsample analysis. We then adopt a triple-difference model to show that the effect varies considerably across households that own residential premises in different regions and with different property characteristics.     

Estimating the Effect of Crime Risk on Property Values and Time on Market: Evidence from Megan's Law in Virginia

We examine neighborhood externalities that arise from the perceived risk associated with the proximity of a registered sex offender's residence. We find large negative externality effects on a property's price and liquidity, employing empirical techniques that include a fixed‐effects OLS model, a correction for sample selection bias and censoring using a Heckman treatment, and a three‐stage least‐squares model to account for simultaneity bias in the joint determination of a home's sale price and liquidity. Additionally, we find amplified effects for homes with more bedrooms (a proxy for children) and if the nearby offender is designated by the state as “violent.”     

英国医药包装市场概况

一、英国制药业实力雄厚,研发投入产出比居世界领先地位 多年来,英国的制药业始终位于世界前列,也是英国最成功的产业,位居高技术产业的榜首。目前英国有400多家医药生产和科研公司,主要集中于英国东南部和西北部。雇员超过6万人,其中三分之一为科研人员。2001年科技研友(R＆D)的投入超过30亿英镑,占整个英国制造业科研投入的37％以上。     

Mixed Oligopoly and Market Power Mitigation: Evidence from the Colombian Wholesale Electricity Market*

Using information on price bids in wholesale electricity pools and empirical techniques described in the literature on electricity markets, this study identifies the market power mitigation effect of public firms in the Colombian market. The results suggest that while private firms exercise less market power than is predicted by a profit-maximization model, there are marked differences between private and public firms in their exercise of unilateral market power. These findings support the hypothesis of the market power mitigation effect of public firms.     

"一股独大"悖论:中国证券市场的经验证据

目前对于中国证券市场诸多问题的探讨大多集中于“一股独大”，似乎其是“万恶之源”。本文采用主成分分析和多元回归的统计方法，系统分析了股权集中程度、第一大股东性质与综合业绩的相关关系。本文发现：股权集中度与综合业绩存在正相关关系，第一大股东为国有行政性单位的上市公司较第一大股东为非行政性单位的上市公司的综合业绩要差。鉴于本文的经验证据与现行主流观点相左，所以有“悖论”之称。针对这一“悖论”，本文给出了两个解释。     

Market Power and Patent Strategies: Evidence from Renaissance Venice

This paper exploits the introduction of the first regularized patent system, which appeared in the Venetian Republic in 1474, to examine the factors shaping inventors’ propensity to use a new form of intellectual property. We combine detailed information on craft guilds and patents in Renaissance Venice and show a negative association between patenting activity and guild statutory norms that strongly restricted entry and price competition. Our analysis shows that the heterogeneity in patenting activity documented by the industrial organization literature is not a special feature of modern technologies, but is rather a persistent phenomenon affected by market power.     

Market Structure after Horizontal Mergers: Evidence from the Banking Industry

Antitrust agencies use measures of market structure to evaluate the likely competitive effects of proposed mergers, but little is known about how measures of market structure change over time, particularly after consummation of mergers and acquisitions. This paper analyzes the changes in market structure 3 and 5 years after mergers in the US banking industry. Our analysis suggests that concentration decreases and the number of banks increases in banking markets where mergers resulted in high concentration levels. In markets where the level of concentration changed by a relatively large amount, our findings are more ambiguous, as the level of concentration decreases, but no effect is found on the number of competitors.     

Internet Auctions and Frictionless Commerce: Evidence from the Retail Gift Card Market

This study investigates the pricing of retail gift cards on eBay. We find substantially less price dispersion than previously documented in other online markets for consumer goods. As gift cards are homogenous goods with clearly defined value, this suggests that greater price dispersion found in other markets may be due to unobservable differences in product characteristics, or from lacking the competitive nature of auction environments. Additionally, gift cards for the discount retailer Wal-Mart exhibit less price dispersion than other large retailers’ gift cards, consistent with the perception that greater search by price-sensitive shoppers can lead to less friction in markets.     

Market Power and Multimarket Contact: Some Evidence from the Spanish Hotel Industry

This paper analyses the effect of multimarket contact on firms’ behaviour. According to Bernheim and Whinston [1990], firms that meet in several markets for an infinite number of periods may find it profitable to redistribute market power among markets where they are operating. We present evidence supporting this prediction by using data from the Spanish hotel industry. Moreover, we also find that the omission of variables measuring multimarket contact creates a downward bias on the effect of concentration on prices. This result questions previous conclusions about the role of competition in industries where multimarket behaviour is expected.     

High Leverage and Willingness to Pay: Evidence from the Residential Housing Market

I document a strong correlation between paying the full listing price on homes and borrowing 100% loan‐to‐value. Homebuyers who do both overpay by 2.8% to 3.9% ($4,800 to $6,700) and are 22.7% more likely to have their properties foreclosed within one year. The correlation is not mechanical: there is a discontinuity in the average leverage around the full listing price. The correlation is stronger in areas with a high fraction of financially constrained and unsophisticated residents, and in areas of high past price growth (potentially indicative of buyer optimism).     

Price Controls and Market Structure: Evidence from Gasoline Retail Markets

In this paper we study the effect of price floor regulations on the organization and performance of markets. The standard interpretation of the effects of these policies is concerned with short‐run market distortions associated with excess supply. Since price controls prevent markets from clearing, they lead to higher prices. While this analysis may be correct in the short‐run, it does not consider the dynamic equilibrium consequences of price controls. We demonstrate that price floor regulations can have important long‐run effects on the the structure of markets by crowding them and creating endogenous barriers to entry for low‐cost retailers. Moreover, we show that these factors can indirectly lower productivity and possibly even prices. We test this in the context of an actual regulation imposed in the retail gasoline market in the Canadian province of Québec and show that the policy led to more competition between smaller/less efficient stations. This resulted in lowered sales, and, despite the reduction in efficiency, did not increase prices.     

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.     

Constructing and reconstructing school technology in England and Wales

The British government has claimed that no other western country has given such prominence to technology in the curriculum for all pupils of compulsory school age. The paper considers this innovation in the national curriculum of England and Wales from a number of perspectives. The first reviews the social processes by which design & technology assumed the form it took in the original Statutory Order of 1990 and by which it underwent reconstruction, leading to the revised Order of 1995. In so doing, it explores the development of a national policy for school technology, comparable to that enunciated for school science in 1985. A second perspective focuses on the increasingly important role of technology in the government's overall educational policy, especially in relation to the better preparation of pupils for the world of work and the securing of parity between academic and vocational courses. A third theme concerns the changing relationship between school science and school technology.David Layton was professor of science education in the University of Leeds from 1973 until retirement in 1989. He served on the British government's Working Group which provided the original recommendations for design & technology in the national curriculum and has written extensively on the value aspects of school technology and the relations of school science and school technology.     

Constructing and reconstructing school technology in England and Wales

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - The British government has claimed that no other western country has given such prominence to technology in the curriculum for all pupils...