Illegal Cartel Overcharges in Markets with a Legal Cartel History: Bitumen Prices in South Africa

In recent years, South African competition authorities have initiated a number of price‐fixing cases in markets where cooperation among competitors was legal and often encouraged. These markets present economists with special difficulties when estimating cartel overcharges. Conventional approaches often rely on temporal approaches, where pricing during the cartel period is compared with prices in a competitive period. In markets with a legal cartel history, a competitive price cannot be identified in the period preceding illegal collusion. Structural change also reduces data, and hence the robustness of temporal models. Spatial approaches, where prices are compared with those in other countries, offer a better alternative. The paper studies the performance of temporal and spatial approaches in estimating overcharge in the context of a bitumen price‐fixing case. The results suggest that, while the bitumen cartel may have responded to cost and demand shocks in a similar way to how players in more competitive markets respond, it was still cushioned by a large monopoly premium: the long‐run level of South African bitumen prices are higher than in comparable competitive markets. The findings have implications for the study of transition dynamics from legal to illegal cartel regimes and for the detection of cartels.     

Libéralisation du commerce et intégration spatiale des marchés: Le cas du maïs au Togo

Abstract: The cereal market of Togo was liberalized in 1987. This policy aims to improve markets' spatial integration through the development of arbitrage. The paper assesses the extent of maize market spatial integration in order to understand how it has been affected by price liberalization. The monthly retail maize prices collected on 13 markets for the period from 1980 to 2001 are considered. The results show that the impact of price liberalization on markets integration is moderate. The liberalization has not significantly improved the extent of long‐run and short‐run integration of maize markets. The speed of price adjustment is relatively weak for most of the markets. In order to improve market efficiency, it is suggested that the government should create a market information service (SIM) which will be entrusted in collecting and disseminating weekly cereal prices all over the country.     

Assessing the price dynamics of onshore and offshore RMB markets: An ITS model approach

This paper investigates how the price dynamics of both onshore and offshore RMB markets are affected by fundamental determinants, market liquidity, global risk aversion and policies by using daily data from August 2010 to February 2016. The interval time series (ITS) modelling is applied to study the RMB price mechanism by capturing prices of the two markets as one self-formed interval data. An interval-based Wald test is constructed to examine the differences between the coefficients and an interval-based Mallows criterion is proposed for choosing appropriate explanatory variables. We find that both the price level and the price differences of onshore and offshore RMB markets are greatly affected by economic fundamentals indicated by different returns on stock indexes and market liquidity indicated by bid-ask prices of offshore market price. In addition, it is suggested that the interest rate spread between China and the US and the global risk appetite do not significantly affect the RMB price for both onshore and offshore markets. Finally, the results imply that “811 reform” of the RMB exchange rate regime does not change the fundamental price dynamics of RMB markets, but significantly changes how economic fundamentals affect the price mechanism of RMB exchange rate.     

亚洲四国汇率风险与贸易--远期外汇市场的作用

本文基于对上世纪90年代至2005年的四个亚洲国家与美国间双边出口贸易数据的实证结果比较，采用VAR方法证明了存在一个成熟有效的远期外汇市场可以帮助出口企业规避汇率风险。最后，引用泰国案例，实证说明为了确保远期外汇市场能够提供准确的汇率价格信号，政府不应过度干预该市场。     

Multimarket Equilibrium,Trade, and the Law of One Price

This paper describes the setup of two classroom markets, one with a thin supply side and relatively higher prices. A comparison of the equilibrium price tendencies in the two markets helps students discover how to apply supply and demand analysis in this context. The introduction of speculators, who buy in one market and sell in the other, reduces or eliminates the price disparity. Class discussion can be focused on how “nonproductive” speculation can increase surplus measures of efficiency when price is permitted to convey the correct information about opportunity cost. Use: This experiment can be used in classes in the principles of economics, intermediate economics, or international trade to illustrate supply and demand analysis and the effects of inter-market trade. In upper-level classes, optimal bidding can be addressed as well. Time: Reading instructions and completing five trading rounds takes 30 to 40 minutes. Discussion lasts an additional 15 minutes. Materials: One deck of cards for up to 36 students, one copy of the instructions, and eight small blank slips of paper for each student.     

IPO锁定期、信息生产和效率

本文研究资产的IPO锁定期对投资者行为、市场价格波动及市场效率的影响。发现在比较一般的设定下,资产市场的信息支出并不是有效的：短期交易者对“关于信息的信息”的支出是完全浪费的。而且这类信息的搜集造成了与其无关资产的价格波动,使得两类与基本面无关的资产的价格具有了相关性。Brav and Gompers（2003）为将IPO锁定期存在的理由归纳为三类：一是作为企业质量的信号;二是用来减轻后市道德风险;三是作为投资银行从市场获得补偿的途径。本文作为一个补充,提供了第四类理由：锁定期抑制了一类无用信息的生产,减少了社会浪费。     

The Price of Electricity in Indonesia

Persistent shortages of electric power and of capital to fund power system expansion have recently prompted the Indonesian government to allow the private sector to supply electricity. Price has become a controversial issue—both the retail price private producers would charge the public, and the wholesale price at which they would seil in bulk to the state utility, PLN The government has traditionally kept the retail price below cost to support economic development objectives, and subsidies have covered PLN's losses. Opponents of private power argue that without subsidies private suppliers would have to raise the retail price to unacceptable levels—according to PLN, almost 50% more per kilowatt-hour than its own price. The paper assesses PLN's claim by quantifying hidden subsidies, and demonstrates that, if these were properly taken into account, the average retail price per kilowatt-hour for 1980–93 should have been 46% higher than it was.     

Evaluating the risk of Chinese housing markets: What we know and what we need to know

Real estate is an important driver of the Chinese economy, which itself is vital for global growth. However, data limitations make it challenging to evaluate competing claims about the state of Chinese housing markets. This paper brings new data and analysis to the study of supply and demand conditions in nearly three dozen major cities. We first document the most accurate measures of land values, construction costs, and overall house prices. We then create and investigate a number of supply and demand metrics to see if price growth reasonably can be interpreted as reflecting local market fundamentals. Key results include the following:

• (1)Real house price growth has been high, averaging 10% per annum since 2006. However, there is substantial heterogeneity across markets, ranging from 2.8% (Jinan) to 19.8% (Beijing). House price growth is driven by rising land values, not by construction costs. Real land values have risen by 14.4% per annum on average. In Beijing, the increase has been by a remarkable 27.5% per year (or by 1036%) since 2004.
• (2)There is variation about the strong positive trend in house price and land value growth. Land values fell by nearly one-third at the beginning of the global financial crisis, but more than fully recovered amidst the 2009–2010 Chinese stimulus. More recent growth has been much more modest, with some markets beginning to decline. Quantities of land sales by local governments to private residential developers have dropped sharply since 2013. The most recent data show transactions volumes down by half or more. This should lead to a reduced supply of new housing units in coming years.
• (3)Market-level analysis of short- and longer-run changes in supply–demand balances finds important variation across markets. In the major East region markets of Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen which have experienced very high rates of real price growth, we estimate that the growth in households demanding housing units has outpaced new construction since the turn of the century. However, there are thirteen large markets, primarily in the interior of the country, in which new housing production has outpaced household growth by at least 30% and another eleven in which it did so by at least 10%. Regression results show that a one standard deviation increase in local market housing inventory is associated with a 0.45 standard deviation lower rate of real house price growth the following year.
• (4)There are no official data on residential vacancy rates in China, but some researchers have reported very high figures (17%+). We develop a new series at the provincial level which yields a much lower vacancy rate on average, but it has been rising—from 5.2% in 2009 to 7.8% in 2014.
• (5)The risk of housing even in markets such as Beijing which show no evidence of oversupply, is best evidenced by price-to-rent ratios. They are well above 50 in the capital city. Poterba's (1984) user cost model suggests these levels can be justified only if owners have sufficiently high expectations of future capital gains. Even a modest one percentage point drop in expected appreciation (or increase in interest rates) would result in a drop in prices of about one-third, absent an offsetting increase in rents.

     

国际商品市场中"一价定律"的验证:共同概率模型和动态贸易变量

本文讨论并引伸了Barrett和Li(2002)提出的共同概率模型,在原有基础上将贸易变量动态化,以增加在经验分析中所包含的信息量和解释能力。考虑到国际商品贸易的跨期性,我们的预期价格采用了商品期货价。我们用改进后的方法对中美大豆贸易做了实证分析,发现两国大豆市场自1995年以来基本上是整合的,并发现对竞争性均衡关系的偏离主要发生在早期,即在中国商品期货市场完善和农产品市场体制改革之前。研究还发现两国大豆价差在南美豆收获期后明显缩小。收益不确定性参数的t检验不显著在一定程度上表明了进口商对价格风险的规避行为。     

Idiosyncratic Information,Moral Hazard,and the Cost of Capital

This paper examines the effects of idiosyncratic accounting information on a firm's cost of capital. By embedding a moral hazard problem into a multifirm asset‐pricing model, I show that moral hazard distorts the sharing of idiosyncratic risk but does not affect the sharing of systematic risk in the economy. A firm‐level improvement in idiosyncratic information reduces the firm's cost of capital even though it does not affect the implied cost of capital inferred from publicly traded shares. Moreover, an economy‐level improvement in idiosyncratic information reduces the risk premium for idiosyncratic risk but increases the risk premium for systematic risk, resulting in an ambiguous net effect on the firm's cost of capital. These results provide alternative explanations for the mixed empirical evidence on the relation between information quality and the cost of capital.     

Short selling and stock prices with regime switching in the absence of market makers: The case of Japan

This paper investigates the relation between short selling and stock price at an aggregated market level. In order to study the differential impact of market microstructure on short selling, the data from Japanese stock markets are used. Both traditional regression and Markov switching models are used to compare Japanese results to those of U.S. and to admit non-stationary relation between short selling and stock price, respectively. Particularly, relatively long period (1978–2002) of analysis including bullish and bearish periods gives a good testable bed for studying the effect of short selling on stock price according to market condition. The empirical findings reveal that percentage change of short interests has a statistically significant positive relation with stock returns. It gives regulators policy implication that short selling is not a destabilizing activity, but an acceptable form of trading even in the absence of market makers. And short selling information cannot be used as an indicator for predicting future stock markets.     

How Aid Tying Can Impose Additional Cost on Aid Recipients: Evidence on Ghana

Abstract: This study investigates the prices of tied foreign aid imports by estimating the price differentials between tied aid imports and non‐aid imports from bilateral sources to Ghana. The study finds a significant mark‐up on the prices of tied aid imports relative to non‐aid imports, which translates into substantial cost to Ghana. Several reasons, both in Ghana and in the donor countries, could be found for the estimated price differentials. Ghana needs to take steps to improve its investment climate, as a way of reducing investment risk, which in turn will enhance the confidence of export financiers to reduce the incentive to mark up prices of tied commodities. On the part of donor countries, there may be need to examine the market for the supply of aided commodities towards the liberalization of such markets. It is suggested that although the higher costs on tied imports may be a necessary price Ghana had to pay to obtain aid, the associated cost provides a case for the cancellation of the bilateral aid debt to Ghana.     

Contrarian Investment in the Dutch Stock Market

The efficient markets hypothesis states that at any times security prices fully reflect all available information. Contrarian investment strategies do not recognize the efficiency of capital markets. They call for buying undervalued stocks, i.e. stocks with a low price relative to their fundamentals. The idea behind such a strategy is to take advantage of the extrapolation behaviour of naive investors. Using a fresh and extensive data set from the Dutch stock market, we found that these strategies yield an outperformance without a higher risk. Our results make it hard to maintain the efficient market hypothesis.     

Information and Price Setting in a Rural Javanese Market∗

The paper examines the thesis established by Geertz and Dewey that Javanese rural trading practices, although well suited to the pasar marketing system, are maladaptive to larger scale trade. Focusing on a chilli marketing depot in Java the paper outlines the network of trading links which stretch from farmer to end-market, as well as the mechanisms of price setting and credit arrangements. The conclusions reached are that the volume and value of goods handled at this level are considerable and that both price setting and commercial relationships are largely stable. Constraints on entrepreneurial activity are attributed not to a Javanese peasant ethos of “shared poverty” but to lack of capital, dispersed markets, perishable goods and discontinuous information on supply of produce and current market prices.

     

数字货币与传统金融市场的风险双向溢出效应研究

选取2013 年4 月30 日至2020 年7 月10 日比特币、黄金、原油、美元、欧元、日元和人民币的日交易数据,基于DY2012 的溢出指数构建法,着重从动态角度刻画风险溢出的演化趋势,并结合国际政治、经济、突发公共卫生事件,对数字货币市场与传统金融市场间的风险溢出路径及机制进行了剖析。结果表明,数字货币与传统金融市场间具有明显的双向风险溢出效应。在国际重大经济政治的影响下,数字货币对各传统金融市场的风险溢出在特定时期具有相似趋势,传统金融市场对数字货币市场的风险溢出并不规律。在新冠疫情的影响下,除人民币外的传统金融市场和数字货币市场的风险溢出指数均处于高位,且有可能持续下去。     

国际化经营、机构投资者与股价同步性

文章研究了中国上市公司的国际化经营对股价同步性的影响,以及机构投资者在二者关系中所起的作用。结果发现,相对于非国际化经营公司而言,国际化经营公司的股价同步性较高;而国际化经营程度越高,股价同步性越低,且二者的反向关系会随着机构投资者持股比例的增加而增强。结论表明,上市公司提供的信息量、投资者获取信息的成本、投资者的理性程度及结构等因素都会影响投资者识别和区分特质信息和噪音的能力,进而影响股价同步性。     

Incentive Contracts,Market Risk,and Cost of Capital

Should incentive contracts expose the agent to market‐wide shocks? Counterintuitively, I show that market risk cannot be filtered out from the compensation and managed independently by the agent. Under plausible risk preferences, the principal should offer a contract in which performance pay increases following a favorable market shock. In the aggregate, however, the effect of market risk on individual contracts diversifies away and the agency problem does not directly affect the cost of capital. The analysis suggests caution in interpreting changes in cost of capital in terms of the stewardship role of accounting information.     

A soft touch? British industry,empire markets,and the self‐governing dominions,c.1870–1914

The belief that Britain's empire markets were soft is well entrenched in the literature. It is, however, a belief that has been largely untested. Indeed, the literature does not even offer an explicit definition of softness. This article attempts to fill this gap by discussing the meaning of the term and then posing the question whether between 1870 and 1914 Britain's fastest growing markets—Australasia and Canada—can in fact reasonably be labelled soft, as has often been assumed. The article concludes that the demand for British imports in these markets was driven more by considerations of income and price than by colonial sentiment or preference.     

Urbanization, population transition, and growth

This paper analyzes a dual economy consisting of urban marketareas and less developed rural areas with or without local markets.Urban areas have better opportunities for earnings and educationthan rural areas. Rural families choose whether to move to urbanareas at costs that differ from location to location. As percapita output grows relative to the moving cost, urbanizationproceeds, leading to lower fertility, more investments in humanand physical capital per child relative to output per worker,and faster economic growth. These impacts are stronger if ruralareas have no access to markets.     

Markups and export-pricing strategies

We analyze empirically export-price strategies across export destinations using detailed firm-product data. Most recent studies using disaggregated data to investigate why firms charge different prices for the same product on different markets focus on the cost component of prices and neglect the markup component. In this paper, we concentrate on the markup component and examine how variations in firms’ export prices may reflect price discrimination by comparing the markup of firms with different pricing strategies. We make use of detailed firm-level data for exporting firms in the Swedish food sector consisting of both manufacturing and intermediary trading firms. The paper documents the export-price variations within the two sub-sectors and explores how different price strategies correlate with markups. The results offer new information beyond the fact that exporters tend to have a higher markup. In particular, we find that firms in the food-processing sector with a greater ability to discriminate across markets mark their products up even more. This result points to the importance of underlying firm decisions in order to explain differences in export premiums across firms. In addition, the results reveal that markups are a complex function of firm and destination characteristics, and that the relationship between markups and pricing strategies in the manufacturing sector is not necessarily observed in other sectors of the supply chain.