搭建走向美国的贸易平台--徐迎新谈中国纺织品服装贸易展览会(纽约)

由中国纺织工业协会主办，中国国际贸易促进委员会纺织行业分会、美国STS公司、YOUTHFUL USA公司承办的“中国纺织品服装贸易展览会（纽约）”，到今天已经走过了6年的历程。第七届展会将于2006年6月13日～15日如约在美国纽约举办。[编者按]     

Alternatives to the U.S. Antitrust Agency approach to market definition

Shortcomings of the U.S. Antitrust Agency Guidelines method of market definition include failure to focus on competition, the need for cost data, and discontinuities. Two alternative approaches are presented which avoid these problems and the Guidelines' inclusion of substitutes on an all-or-nothing basis. One alternative focuses on the size of a change in capacity of a substitute that would be needed to have the same effects as a unit change in capacity of an initial item. The second proposed alternative offers a simple operational method of giving practical content to the “reasonable interchangeability” concept which is a prominent feature of U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The alternative approaches are evaluated in comparison to that of the Guidelines and some modified versions of the latter.     

美国成品油管道管输能力分配机制及其启示

以用户分类模式、长期托运方及新托运方管输能力分配机制为着眼点,以美国巴克艾伙伴公司和科洛尼尔管道公司为例,详细剖析美国成品油管道的管输能力分配机制。中国成品油管道的公平开放尚处于初期阶段,在深化成品油管道市场化进程中,首先应保证油气设施信息的公开和透明,制订标准的公平开放制度,而后根据中国油气市场行业实际情况逐步细化开放机制。借鉴美国成品油管道管输能力分配机制,对于中国成品油管输能力分配机制,建议:制订全国统一的成品油管网准入制度;搭建统一的管输能力交易平台;考虑地区差异,在统一按历史运输量进行用户分类的模式下,不同地区可根据具体情况对用户分类的具体阈值进行一定程度调整;在管道发生拥塞时,针对长期托运方采取基于历史运输量按比例进行分配的方式;新托运方的管输能力分配采取抽签的方式;监管体系透明化。     

A cointegration rank test of market linkages with an application to the U.S. natural gas industry

This research applies recently developed cointegration techniques to the measurement of market linkages when the data are nonstationary. Likelihood based tests for cointegration are applied to data from natural gas spot markets. The results indicate that natural gas spot markets at dispersed locations in the pipeline network are strongly connected. Most of the market pairs examined in the gas pipeline network satisfy a more stringent condition for perfect market integration.     

Interpenetration of organization and market : Japan's firm and market in comparison with the U.S.

Resource allocation mechanisms used in the market and within the firm are quite often a mixture of the pure market principle and the pure organization principle. Market principles penetrate into the firm's resource allocation and organization principles creep into the market allocation. Interpenetration occurs to remedy the failure of pure principles other in the market or in the organization. After presenting this new perspective, we analyze resource allocation mechanisms in Japan and the U.S. One conclusion is that interpenetration patterns are rather different between the two countries due to institutional, economic and societal differences. We also analyze the ways in which these differences affect Japanese and American corporate behavior in such areas as diversification strategy, corporate financing, and innovation and venture business activity.     

Testing for market power in the U.S. motor carrier industry

During the 1980's, researchers noted a trend towards increased concentration in the general freight, less-than-truckload (LTL) portion of the U.S. motor carrier industry. The purpose of this study is to employ new empirical industrial organization techniques to determine whether the more concentrated, post-1980, LTL industry exerted monopoly pricing behavior and to compare the nature of pricing behavior before and after regulation reform. The results suggest that the trend toward increased industry concentration does not imply anti-competitive performance. Also, the results indicate the presence of regulation-induced market power several years prior to regulation reform in 1980.     

Market structure and U.S. trade flows

Using samples of input-output table detailed industries, we test the impact of various elements of market structure on U.S. trade flows, at the industry level, holding factor proportions constant. Industry demand characteristics and the extent of scale economies have significant impacts on trade flows. Labor intensity at the industry level has the effects on trade flows which are predicted by the factor proportions theory. Capital intensity increases both import and export flows; this result, together with certain others, suggests the importance of trade among industrialized countries in producer goods.     

Measuring Market Power in the U.S. Aluminum Industry: A Residual Demand Approach

This paper applies a refined market power test to examine market power in the U.S. aluminum industry. The study conducts a two-step analysis in which the inverse residual demand facing the industry is first estimated to generate the associate elasticity to infer market power, and then the inverse partial residual demand facing the industry is estimated to produce the elasticity to measure the potential effect of inter-industry coordination. The results suggest that only the primary industry attains market power, and the market power can exert even without collusion between the primary and secondary industries.     

Announcement effects and market efficiency in a thin market: An empirical application to the Singapore equity market

Studies of share price responses to public announcements have assumed that there is no serious thinness in trading. This paper reports the findings of a study of price responses of thinly-traded shares in the Singapore equity market. With appropriate methodological refinements for thinness in trading, the announcement effects of earnings, dividends and capitalisation changes are studied. The results suggest that there are statistically significant abnormal returns during the months up to and including the month of announcement. With some minor exceptions, there appears to be no significant abnormal returns during the months after the announcements: semi-strong form efficiency is thus observed. These results are consistent with prior findings in the developed capital markets.The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions. This paper has benefitted from financial assistance of the Department of Commerce of the University of Queensland.     

The U.S. Motion Pictures Industry: An Empirical Approach

We hypothesize that the U.S. motion pictures industry is structured so that star presence increases box office receipts and (less so) admissions, but places Ricardian limits on the output of blockbusters. The few dominant studios (majors) rely on a modified star system to generate supra-normal box office by stimulating admissions at exhibitors. Rising costs (from stars and their promotion) are required for rising revenues; that is, the majors gain revenue only at higher costs. Although the industry has unique features, the empirical results are surprisingly relevant to other industries.     

Joint oligopsony-oligopoly in the U.S. leaf tobacco market, 1924–39

The leaf tobacco marketplace is highly organized. Prior to 1940, the few large tobacco companies controlled that organization explicitly. The question is whether this organization set oligopsonistic leaf prices or minimized production and transaction costs. A model of joint oligopsonyoligopoly shows that pricing of cigarettes and leaf tobacco was unified: oligopolistic cigarette pricing was sufficient to curtail both cigarette production and leaf purchases. The companies could just bid in the market for the leaf necessary for that cigarette production rate.Prima facie, the organization was not for oligopsony coordination. The implied econometric model of pricing fits observed behavior well.Malcolm Boyd, Dennis Carlton, John Garen, Stephen Karlson, Li Way Lee, An-loh Lin, Robert Miller, Stephen Spurr and the referee have given me thoughtful, perceptive and useful comments. I am pleased to acknowledge their involvement without implicating them in whatever errors remain.     

Measuring market potential for industrial products: An eight-step approach

The assignment given more often than any other to industrial marketing research departments by marketing management is the measurement of market potentials. This sounds like a clear-cut and unequivocal task. However, depending upon the type, age (well-established vs. new product), and use of the product involved, the approaches and avenues to be employed, and the data to be established may differ markedly from one product to another. In order to illustrate this, the seven main categories of undustrial products are briefly discussed below.     

Per-customer quantity limit and price discrimination: Evidence from the U.S. residential mortgage market

Theoretically, if firms face a regulatory per-customer quantity limit, they should have an incentive to discriminatively charge high-demand customers higher prices and make them just willing to buy a quantity equal to the limit. In the U.S. residential mortgage industry, mortgages with origination balances above the conforming loan limits cannot be guaranteed by government-sponsored enterprises, which make lenders face a per-customer quantity limit. This paper finds that borrowers bunching at the limit pay higher interest rates due to price discrimination. This study rules out the alternative explanation that those borrowers are of higher risk (lending cost) than other borrowers.     

List Prices,Sale Prices and Marketing Time: An Application to U.S. Housing Markets

Many goods are marketed after first stating a list price, with the expectation that the eventual sales price will differ. In this article, we first present a simple model of search behavior that includes the seller setting a list price. Holding constant the mean of the buyers’ distribution of potential offers for a good, we assume that the greater the list price, the slower the arrival rate of offers but the greater is the maximal offer. This trade‐off determines the optimal list price, which is set simultaneously with the seller's reservation price. Comparative statics are derived through a set of numerical sensitivity tests, where we show that the greater the variance of the distribution of buyers’ potential offers, the greater is the ratio of the list price to expected sales price. Thus, sellers of atypical goods will tend to set a relatively high list price compared with standard goods. We test this hypothesis using data from the Columbus, Ohio, housing market and find substantial support. We also find empirical support for another hypothesis of the model: atypical dwellings take longer to sell.     

Ownership structure and innovation: An emerging market perspective

Considerable attention has been focused on the ways in which emerging market firms can obtain and mobilize the knowledge and resources required for innovation. Innovation is a particular challenge in emerging markets because of inadequate external institutions. In this study, we focus on the importance of ownership structure, and in particular on ownership type diversity and ownership concentration. Using transaction cost and agency theories embedded in an emerging market context, we argue that ownership structure provides an important mechanism by which firms can assemble and direct the resources necessary for innovation in the context of inadequate external institutions. Specifically, we hypothesize that ownership type diversity improves innovation performance and that increasing ownership concentration has the same effect, but only up to a point. Using a panel dataset of 487 and 475 Chinese listed companies during 2004–2005 and 2005–2006 respectively, we find supportive empirical evidence for our hypotheses. Our findings also suggest that ownership type diversity is a more important factor in explaining innovation performance than ownership concentration, although most of the extant literature focuses on the latter.     

U.S. Multinational Activity Abroad and U.S. Jobs: Substitutes or Complements?

Critics of globalization claim that firms are being driven by the prospects of cheaper labor and lower labor standards to shift employment abroad. Yet the evidence, beyond anecdotes, is slim. This paper reports stylized facts on the activities of U.S. multinationals at home and abroad for the years 1977 to 1999. We focus on firms in manufacturing and services, two sectors that have received extensive media attention for supposedly exporting jobs. Using firm‐level data collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in Washington, D.C., we report correlations between U.S. multinational employment at home and abroad. Preliminary evidence based on the operations of these multinationals suggests that the sign of the correlation depends on the crucial distinction between affiliates in high‐income and low‐income countries. For affiliates in high‐income countries there is a positive correlation between jobs at home and abroad, suggesting that foreign employment of U.S. multinationals is complementary to domestic employment. For firms that operate in developing countries, employment has been cut in the United States, and affiliate employment has increased. To account for firm size, substitution across firms and entry and exit, we aggregate our data to the industry level. This exercise reveals that the observed “complementarity” between U.S. and foreign jobs has been driven largely by a contraction across all manufacturing sectors. It also reveals that foreign employment in developing countries has substituted for U.S. employment in several highly visible industries, including computers, electronics, and transportation. The fact that there were U.S. jobs lost to foreign affiliates in key sectors, despite broad complementarity in hiring and firing decisions between U.S. parents and their affiliates, helps explain why economists view the impact of globalization on U.S. jobs as benign despite negative news coverage for declining industries.     

Price asymmetries and the path dependence of market power: Evidence from the U.S. airline industry

This paper uncovers price asymmetries across oligopolistic and monopolistic markets that are seemingly identical in structure but different in competitive history. This is done by identifying “quiet life” markets that have not (yet) experienced a change in structure, and “non-quiet life” markets that have been disrupted by firm entry and/or exit. Using a long panel dataset from the U.S. airline industry, we find that quiet life duopolies price significantly higher than duopolies that come about by entry in monopoly, and that quiet life monopolies price significantly lower than monopolies that come about by exit in duopoly. We show that the path towards a particular market structure matters for the determination of prices and explore several mechanisms that likely explain the price asymmetries, including engagement in anticompetitive behaviour, adjustment behaviour to market structure changes, and the cost heterogeneity of competing firms.