Competition and monopoly of Chinese rural groundwater market：structure and determinants

China is facing severe problem of water scarcity.Agricultural sector,the main consumer of water resource,has remarkably changed its institutions on water resource deployment,due to heavy environmental pressure.As a new and spontaneous institution,groundwater market has developed rapidly in northern China,and has impacts on waterusing behaviors and benefits of farmers.Using household survey data from Hebei and Henan in 2007,this paper attempts to pin down the development and operating of groundwater market in rural China.We focus on the monopoly and competition in the market.Empirical analysis reveals that Chinese farmers are trying to make rational decision when they compete with others in groundwater market.In general,monopoly is not fierce in Chinese rural groundwater market,with great variations among different villages and even different tubewells within one village.Tubewell costs,regulation and the density of tubewells are the main determinants that affect monopoly level of groundwater market.To make water market benefit more and more farmers of low income,corresponding policies are needed to modify its development in the future.     

Factors influencing commercial buildings to obtain green certificates

Identifying the key factors that influence commercial buildings’ decision to obtain voluntary green certificates is essential to building sustainability enhancement. Using commercial buildings in the state of New York, multinomial logit and nested logit models demonstrate that there is a significant correlation between the characteristics of commercial buildings (such as square footage, lot size, and years built) and green certification. More interestingly, if a commercial building is occupied by its owner, likelihood of green certification is actually smaller. This finding not only confirms that ongoing energy savings are heavily discounted when deciding whether to incur the upfront cost of green certification, but also suggests that the rental premium enjoyed by green buildings is likely greater in terms of present value than the expected operating cost savings. Another explanation could be that investor owners must operate in a competitive market for tenants while owner-occupiers do not operate in that competitive market, so they do not need to obtain green certificates to attract tenants. Consequently for policymakers, building owners that plan to rent out their commercial property space should be the early targets to promote green certification.     

Privatization of Water-Resource Development

This paper analyzes the inefficiencies from market power and return-flow externalities in private construction of a water project. The model pays special attention to increasing groundwater pumping costs, project set-up costs, limited project capacity, and return flow to the aquifer. For a given capacity, the return-flow externality causes project owners to construct the project too late when the price of groundwater is too high because the external benefit of return-flow to the aquifer is not captured. Market power exacerbates these effects since the project owner delays construction to accelerate groundwater overdraft. The return-flow externality and market power also decrease installed capacity and increase overdraft from the aquifer. Applying the model to the construction of the Central Arizona Project (CAP) for a given capacity, the estimated deadweight loss from hypothetical private construction of the project ($0.853 billion) is substantially less than the literature’s estimate of deadweight loss from actual construction by the Bureau of Reclamation ($2.603 billion). However, under the federal subsidies and insecure property rights that accompanied the CAP, private construction results in a larger estimated efficiency loss ($6.126 billion).     

A note on the effects of market power distribution in Cordella and Gabszewicz's Ricardian model

We argue that it is the distribution of market power among agents, rather than the use of market power itself, that may force Ricardian economies into autarky. By applying Baldwin (1948) monopoly equilibrium concepts to the general equilibrium with imperfect competition model analyzed by Cordella and Gabszewicz (1997), we show that the monopoly equilibrium outcome Pareto dominates the oligopoly one. As a consequence, economic efficiency is higher when market power is concentrated in one agent than when it is evenly distributed among few agents.     

Technical change and market structure

This paper investigates the ceteris-paribus effects of labor reducing technical progress on industry-wide employment under different market regimes. We distinguish between a contestable market, a monopoly, and a market with bounded supplier power. Under a constant wage rate, employment will not decrease only if the elasticity of demand on a contestable market exceeds one. The same thing holds for markets with bounded supplier power. Under a monopoly, price elasticity must even be more than three. Ceteris paribus we thus have to expect a higher probability of employment reduction under a monopoly than under other market regimes. Raising wages proportional to productivity leads to an employment reduction on stagnating markets with supplier power. Here a raise in wages without layoffs is only possible if the growth in demand is at least as high as the growth in productivity.The author is indebted to Alfred E. Ott, Sabine Böckem, Rolf Wiegert and Ulf Schiller for valuable comments. Of course, I take responsibility for all remaining errors.     

Bargaining and separation costs in two-sided markets

A two-sided market is characterized by contract negotiations, bilateral exchanges between buyers and sellers. Separation costs endow trading partners with monopoly power, rendering this a market of bilateral monopolistic competition. Market equilibrium is defined by these negotiations, a matching of the two sides, and a set of prices; the costs of disagreement are endogenous. A bargaining strategy some players use is commitment to a position. Disagreements are possible and, contrary to the case of bilateral monopoly, these disagreements are not always inefficient.     

Controlling monopoly power in a double-auction market experiment

There is robust evidence in the experimental economics literature showing that monopoly power is affected by trading institutions. In this paper, we study whether trading institutions themselves can shape agents' market behavior through the formation of anchors. We recreate experimentally five different double-auction market structures (perfect competition, perfect competition with quotas, cartel on price, cartel on price with quotas, and monopoly) in a within-subject design, varying the order of markets implementation. We investigate whether monopoly power endures the formation of price anchors emerged in previously implemented market structures. Results from our classroom experiments suggest that double-auction trading institutions succeed in preventing monopolists from exploiting their market power. Furthermore, the formation of price anchors in previously implemented markets negatively impacts on monopolists' power in later market structures.     

地区性行政垄断的经济增长效应

地区性行政垄断是指地方政府运用行政权力对市场竞争的限制和排斥,往往造成了要素价格扭曲,进而诱致地方保护和市场分割。本文基于一个经济增长模型,并将地区性行政垄断指数纳入该模型中,实证研究了地区性行政垄断对经济增长的影响以及这种影响在开放程度不同的地方会发生什么样的变化。结果表明,地区性行政垄断与经济增长呈倒U型关系,而且经济开放程度越高,地区性行政垄断越不利于经济增长。     

Ethnic divisions,contract choice,and search costs in the Guatemalan land rental market

This paper shows how ethnic diversity in a context of weak property rights enforcement can result in market segmentation. The paper analyzes how contract enforcement problems affect the joint decision of partner and contract choice by landlords in the land rental market in Guatemala. The empirical method allows partner choice to be determined not only by the characteristics and relative scarcity of the specific landowner and tenant, but also by the characteristics of other potential tenants. The results show that landowners without formal title are more likely to restrict their partners to tenants from the same ethnic group. Partner choice is found to be less important for renting with interlinked land–labor contracts.     

市场过程内生的垄断:市场权势和自然垄断

作为内生的垄断现象,市场权势实际上是争胜竞争过程的结果,并非垄断的市场结构所决定。如果将竞争理解为一个动态过程,市场权势具有竞争性和暂时性。自然垄断现象也是市场过程演化过程中的自然现象,无论源于规模经济还是范围经济,都表明自然垄断具有动态效率特征。除非政府人为阻碍争胜竞争过程的展开,通常市场过程内生力量能够有效制约非政府垄断现象。     

Security of property rights and transition in land use

Price and yield uncertainty are traditional considerations in agricultural markets and their impact on development. Agricultural producers in transition economies face an additional risk factor – changes in the institutional protection of property rights. This paper illustrates how institutional uncertainty may affect investment, land use, and crop mix patterns. In particular, in the Ukrainian example, the rights of tenants are viewed as uncertain in anticipation of establishment of an open market for sale of agricultural land. Establishment of the land market in Ukraine has been postponed several times over the last 15 years and a significant number of lease contracts are not formalized. A large panel of farm-level data was used to show that a higher share of rented land is associated with a lower share of land used for investment intensive perennial crops controlling for prices and other factors. The difference in response to uncertainty is found to be significant among three crop types: perennials, grains and oil crops. The implication is that the lower level of protection of use rights and uncertainty regarding the future regulation of land sales market lead to under-investments in more capital intensive crops. As a result, tenants deviate from the optimal crop mix, reducing the productivity of tenant farms. Farms under 200 ha are affected most negatively as they are less likely to be able to access the level of legal and political protection enjoyed by large farms.     

How do Markets Manage Water Resources? An Experiment

We experimentally test how a private monopoly, a duopoly and a public utility allocate water of differing qualities to households and farmers. Most of our results are in line with the theoretical predictions. Overexploitation of the resources is observed independently of the market structure. Stock depletion for the public utility is the fastest, followed by the private duopoly and private monopoly. On the positive aspects of centralized public management, we find that the average quality to price ratio offered by the public monopoly is substantially higher than that offered by the private monopoly or duopoly.     

Equilibrium youth unemployment

In a model with continuous entry and exit to the labor market, it is shown that workers exploit their monopoly power by adopting a seniority system implying youth unemployment or an age determined insider-outsider distinction. The incentives of young outsiders to unberbid are curtailed by their expectation of becoming insiders in the future.     

规制权力配置、下游垄断与中国电力产业的接入歧视-理论分析与初步的实证检验

本文构建了一个"上游竞争、下游垄断"结构下接入歧视的简化模型,分析了部分纵向一体化的买方垄断者对独立发电企业实施接入价格和数量歧视的动机和条件。在揭示歧视行为与规制重建滞后之间的特征性事实的基础上,我们利用500多家发电企业和区域电网的相关数据,从统计描述和回归分析两个方面对理论假设进行了初步的检验,结果证明了两类接入歧视,特别是价格歧视的存在。     

Controling tax evasion under direct and indirect taxation: Some notes

The purpose of the paper is to use a simple model of the firm having monopoly power in the goods market as the framework to study the relative effectiveness of unit, ad valorem and profit taxes under two alternative criteria when the taxes are changeds so as to keep either the expected utility of the monopoly firm or the expected tax revenues for government constant. Under the former policy the profit tax turns out to be best and the unit tax worst in all respects; for instance, the profit tax will give rise to higher production, lower prices, lower tax evasion and higher tax revenues for government than other taxes. The dominance of the profit tax and the inferiority of the unit tax still holds under the policy of keeping the expected tax revenues constant in terms of production, prices and the expected utility of the monopoly firm. But strikingly, in terms of effectiveness of tax evasion control the ranking of taxes is now exactly the reverse from the one obtained under the expected utility criterium; now the unit tax is best and the profit tax worst.     

Market Power with Interdependent Demand: Sale of Emission Permits and Natural Gas from Russia

With implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, Russia will most likely be able to exert market power in the emission permit market. But, as Russia is also a big exporter of fossil fuels, the incentives to boost the permit price may be weak. However, a significant share of Russia’s fossil fuel exports is natural gas. If a high permit price boosts the demand for natural gas through substitution from more polluting fuels and thus increase gas profits, this may increase the incentives to exert monopoly power in the permit market. Moreover, a large fossil fuel exporter may use its market position to influence the effective demand for permits. Hence, the relationship between permit income and fossil fuels exports runs in both directions. In this article, we explore the interdependence between the revenues from permit and fossil fuel exports both theoretically and numerically. A computable general equilibrium model suggests the fact that Russia as a big gas exporter has small effect on the incentives to exert monopoly power in the permit market. Moreover, Russia’s monopoly power in the permit market has a small, but non-negligible impact on the optimal level of Russian gas exports.     

The Performance of Public and Private Enterprise under Conditions of Active and Passive Ownership and Competition and Monopoly

Privatisation is driven by the belief that public ownership is cost inefficient, in particular under monopoly. However, some theoretical and empirical studies have questioned whether privatisation will necessarily lead to efficiency gains. This paper focuses on the impact of ownership when owners can be either active or passive. Active owners decide on output, whereas passive owners delegate this decision to a risk-averse manager. It turns out that managerial slack as reflected in the marginal costs will actually be the same or higher in a private monopoly than under public ownership. The impact of entry is theoretically ambiguous, but an increased number of firms in an oligopoly may lead to lower efficiency.     

中国行业垄断的收入分配效应

收入分配差距过大是中国社会发展的难点和热点问题,行业垄断已经成为加剧中国收入分配矛盾的重要原因。为此,本文构建新的垄断-竞争两部门利润分享模型,揭示行业垄断影响收入分配的内在机制,并结合中国的经验数据进行实证分析。研究表明,行业垄断在产品与要素市场中,通过最终产品消费的福利转移、要素的区别定价以及垄断利润在不同就业者之间的非均衡分享导致收入分配差距的扩大;在行业垄断力量对经济干预较多的阶段,收入差距扩大问题较为严重,并且往往表现为劳动总收入的下降。因此,持续提升劳动者收入,保持收入分配的合理化,必须配合行之有效的行政垄断部门改革,打破行业垄断所形成的二元经济结构,降低行业垄断在生产和分配领域中的影响。     

Reforming the Private Rental Sector: Challenges in the 2020s and Beyond

Researchers, policy-makers and the media all highlight a crisis in the Australian private rental sector. Often, proposed rental reforms that centre tenants are claimed to cause property owner disinvestment and have a negative impact on the rental market. Recent research which we co-authored found these claims are not substantiated by evidence. In this article, we argue that further reforms are needed to improve the functioning of the rental market for tenants. We examine some of the most contentious issues in rental regulation and assess the evidence of their impacts, drawing from our own research as well as that of others.     

电力产业化解两难困境的经济学研究

从供需均衡角度分析了长期困扰中国电力产业的两难困境(电力短缺和电价过高),而产生两难困境的根源在于垂直一体化垄断;尽管电力体制改革在一定程度上打破了这种垄断,但是电网公司的输配售一体化垄断仍然成为化解两难困境的梗阻;通过网售分开,在电力产业构建充分竞争的电力市场,有效降低电力的生产和零售成本,成本的降低推动供给曲线向右下方平移,在其他条件不变的前提下实现既降低电价又增加电量的目的,从而有效化解两难困境。