Natural oligopolies with exogenous sunk costs: A non-Suttonian result

In a spatial competition model with exogenous fixed costs and divisible goods, we obtain non-Suttonian results. When the economy is infinitely replicated, the number of firms does go to infinity but, as consumers’ income goes to infinity, the equilibrium number of firms tends toward a finite value. This occurs because the global demand to each firm becomes in the limit infinitely sensitive to price differentials since they give then rise to infinitely large differences in purchase expenditure.     

Efficient agglomeration of spatial clubs

We investigate here the agglomeration of spatial clubs in an efficient allocation of a club economy. The literature on agglomeration has focused largely on a primary agglomeration caused by direct attraction forces. We concentrate mainly on secondary and tertiary agglomerations caused by a primary agglomeration. Initially, scale economies in the provision of club goods (CGs) lead each CG to agglomerate in facilities of its club. This primary agglomeration causes a secondary concentration of population around these facilities, which in turn brings about a tertiary agglomeration of facilities of different clubs into centers in the midst of population concentration. The agglomeration of facilities occurs only if a secondary concentration of population takes place. We analyze in detail two specific patterns of agglomeration. One is the central location pattern in which the facilities of all clubs agglomerate perfectly in the middle of the complex. The second is a triple-centered complex in which the center in the middle of the complex consists of perfectly agglomerated facilities of different clubs, each with a single facility per complex. The remaining two centers also consist of facilities of different clubs, but clubs in these centers each have two facilities per complex, one in each center. Each of these two centers is located between a boundary and the middle of the complex closer to the middle of the complex than to the boundary. The facilities in these two centers form condensed clusters of facilities that may contain residential land in between the facilities. We then show that these agglomeration patterns also characterize agglomerations in general. The literature maintains that an efficiently behaving municipality increases its tax-base. This implies that it is in the municipality’s interest to achieve efficiency. The best way for a local government to achieve this desired efficiency is by partially intervening in market operations in order to internalize local externalities. Such an intervention should be limited to providing the city’s infrastructure, to taxing only residential land rents and clubs’ profits, to subsidizing the basic industry of the city, and to partially regulating land uses. Consequently, if the local governments of all complexes behave according to the above, the decentralization of the efficient allocation of the club economy would be attained.     

把宝鸡建成区域中心大城市

宝鸡市是我国西部重要的工业城市和交通枢纽 ,是陕西省仅次于西安的重要城市。把宝鸡建成区域中心大城市是实施西部大开发的客观选择和经济社会发展的客观要求。为此 ,应该加快宝鸡的经济发展和相应提升其重要的环境条件。     

Agglomeration economies with consistent productivity estimates

This paper investigates the relative impact of microeconomic agglomeration mechanisms on plant's total factor productivity (TFP) using German establishment and employment-level data. Contrasting different strategies for estimating TFP from plant-level production functions reveals that unobserved output prices bias true productivity and lead to underestimated agglomeration economies. With the corrected TFP measure, the largest impact is found for labor market pooling, which is captured by the correlation of the occupational composition between one county-industry and the rest of the county. This main result is robust, even when the spatial units are resized from counties to larger labor market regions. Input linkages appear to be relevant only at this larger regional scale. Overall, agglomeration economies differ substantially across industries. Only for a subset of industries, some positive evidence is detected for knowledge spillovers.     

Sequential city growth: Empirical evidence

Using two comprehensive datasets on populations of cities and metropolitan areas for a large set of countries, I present three new empirical facts about the evolution of city growth. First, the distribution of cities’ growth rates is skewed to the right in most countries and decades. Second, within a country, the average rank of each decade’s fastest-growing cities tends to rise over time. Finally, this rank increases faster in periods of rapid growth in urban population. These facts can be interpreted as evidence in favor of the hypothesis that historically, urban agglomerations have followed a sequential growth pattern: Within a country, the initially largest city is the first to grow rapidly for some years. At some point, the growth rate of this city slows down and the second-largest city then becomes the fastest-growing one. Eventually, the third-largest city starts growing fast as the two largest cities slow down, and so on.     

A political economy model of road pricing

In this paper, we use a simple majority voting model to study the introduction of urban congestion tolls. The model allows for different types of uncertainty and considers different uses of the toll revenues. The following results are obtained. First, we show that individual uncertainty with respect to modal substitution costs may imply that a majority votes against road pricing ex ante, although a majority would have been in favor after its introduction ex post. Moreover, if a majority is against road pricing ex ante, there will also be no majority for organizing an experiment that would take away the individual uncertainty. Second, political uncertainty with respect to the use of the revenues corroborates the finding that ex ante more voters will be against the introduction of tolls. Third, both types of uncertainty suggest that fewer voters are against road pricing when toll revenues are used to subsidize public transport than when they are redistributed to all voters. Importantly, the results of this paper are consistent with a number of recent empirical observations on efforts to introduce road pricing, including the systematic rejection of road pricing in referenda, the more favorable attitudes towards road pricing after than before its introduction, and tying the toll revenues to support public transport.     

Welfare and efficiency in incomplete market economies with a single firm

In the quasilinear case, surplus maximization leads to constrained efficient Drèze equilibria. We investigate the question of whether surplus maximization can be useful beyond the quasilinear case.     

Entrepreneurship and Post‐socialist Growth*

We use a rich regional data set to obtain a statistical characterization of the relationship between entrepreneurial activity and economic growth within post‐Soviet Russia. Russia is a useful laboratory for evaluating links between entrepreneurial activity and growth because of the striking variation in initial conditions, the adoption of policy reforms, and entrepreneurial activity observed across its large number of regions in the early stages of transition. Russia has also experienced striking regional variation in subsequent growth. Conditional on variations in initial conditions and policy reform measures, regional entrepreneurial activity exhibits a statistically and quantitatively significant relationship with subsequent economic growth.     

Identification in a model of sorting with social externalities and the causes of urban segregation

This paper discusses nonparametric identification in a model of sorting in which location choices depend on the location choices of other agents as well as prices and exogenous location characteristics. In this model, demand slopes and hence preferences are not identifiable without further restrictions because of the absence of independent variation of endogenous composition and exogenous location characteristics. Several solutions of this problem are presented and applied to data on neighborhoods in US cities. These solutions use exclusion restrictions, based on either subgroup demand shifters, the spatial structure of externalities, or the dynamics of prices and composition in response to an amenity shock. The empirical results consistently suggest the presence of strong social externalities, that is a dependence of location choices on neighborhood composition.     

Real option value over a housing market cycle

This paper analyzes how the dynamics of house prices are affected by the option to rebuild or enlarge existing dwellings. The nonlinear functional form for option value and zoning limits provides identification of changes in option value over the cycle. For homes with high development potential, our results show that about 40% of the price increases during the boom years after the fall of the Berlin Wall were related to increased option value. In the subsequent bust about 50% of their price decline was associated with decreased option value. For dwellings with low redevelopment potential 12% of the decline in real value can be attributed to changing option value.     

我国企业研发组织模式创新研究：分类、现状与趋势

面对日益激烈的市场竞争,企业要建立核心竞争优势,其研发创新必不可少。研发组织模式的选择在研发环节中扮演着至关重要的角色,它直接关系到企业的研发绩效和创新潜力。本文从研发组织形态、研发组织结构以及技术资金来源及投入三个维度对企业研发组织模式进行探索,并面向北京市中关村高新技术示范区内的企业展开访谈及问卷调查,分析了研发组织模式的发展现状及创新趋势。     

Competitive equilibria in economies with multiple indivisible and multiple divisible commodities

In this paper we consider a general equilibrium model with a finite number of divisible and a finite number of indivisible commodities. In models with indivisibilities it is typically assumed that there is only one divisible good, which serves as money. The presence of money in the model is used to transfer the value of certain amounts of indivisible goods. For such economies with only one divisible commodity Danilov et al. showed the existence of a general equilibrium if the individual demands and supplies belong to a same class of discrete convexity. For economies with multiple divisible goods and money van der Laan et al. proved existence of a general equilibrium if the divisible goods are produced out of money using a linear production technology and no other producers are present in the model.     

Does home owning smooth the variability of future housing consumption?

We show that the hedging benefit of owning a home reduces the variability of housing consumption after a move. When a current home owner’s house price covaries positively with housing costs in a future city, changes in the future cost of housing are offset by commensurate changes in wealth before the move. Using Census micro-data, we find that the cross-sectional variation in house values subsequent to a move is lower for home owners who moved between more highly covarying cities. Our preferred estimates imply that an increase in covariance of one standard deviation reduces the variance of subsequent housing consumption by about 11%. Households at the top end of the covariance distribution who are likely to have owned large homes before moving get the largest reductions, of up to 40% relative to households at the median.     

中部地区城市群空间范围界定

对中部地区城市群的认识,目前主要有三城市群说、四城市群说、五城市群说、六城市群说等几种观点,且中部地区各城市群的概念、空间范围差异很大。对中部地区城市群的空间特征进行科学分析,为合理布局城市群发展空间、优化城市群空间结构和形成中部崛起的城市群带动机制提供参考依据。     

Trip-timing decisions with traffic incidents

This paper analyzes traffic bottleneck congestion when drivers randomly cause incidents that temporarily block the bottleneck. Drivers have general scheduling preferences for time spent at home and at work. They independently choose morning departure times from home to maximize expected utility without knowing whether an incident has occurred. The resulting departure time pattern may be compressed or dispersed according to whether or not the bottleneck is fully utilized throughout the departure period on days without incidents. For both the user equilibrium (UE) and the social optimum (SO) the departure pattern changes from compressed to dispersed when the probability of an incident becomes sufficiently high. The SO can be decentralized with a time-varying toll, but drivers are likely to be strictly worse off than in the UE unless they benefit from the toll revenues in some way. A numerical example is presented for illustration. Finally, the model is extended to encompass minor incidents in which the bottleneck retains some capacity during an incident.     

Uniform versus peak-load pricing of a bottleneck with elastic demand

This paper considers commuting to work across a bottleneck such as a bridge or tunnel, with elastic demand. With no toll, there is wasteful queueing. The optimal peak-load toll eliminates queueing and leaves total traffic unchanged. The second-best uniform toll cannot eliminate queueing, but reduces total traffic. The second-best uniform toll may be larger or smaller than the maximum value of the optimal peak-load toll.     

尽快将合川市建成重庆地区中心城市

加快城镇建设 ,对于调整农村经济结构、尽快将合川市建成重庆地区中心城市有着十分重要的意义。改革开放以来 ,合川市的城镇建设经过全市人民的共同努力 ,取得了可喜的成绩 :城镇建成区面积达到 2 9 6平方公里 (城市建成区 1 3 8平方公里 ) ,城镇人口达到 30 7万人 (城区 2 0万人 ) ,城市化率达到2 0 %。“十五”期间 ,合川市的成镇建设将面临新的形势和新的任务 ,因此 ,理清城镇建设的思路、确定城镇建设的目标、制定城镇建设的措施是十分必要的。　　一、“十五”期间合川市城镇建设的指导思想和原则　　指导思想 :以“三个有利于”为标…     

A new economic geography model of central places

One of the most striking feature of the space-economy is that cities form a hierarchical system exhibiting some regularity in terms of their size and the array of goods they supply. In order to show how such a hierarchical system may emerge, we consider a model with monopolistically competitive markets for the industrial sectors. As transport costs steadily decrease from large values, the urban system formed by several small cities entails structural changes in that some cities expand at the expense of the others by attracting a growing number of industries. Beyond some threshold, some cities disappear from the space-economy. Such an evolution of the urban system describes fairly well what has been observed in various historical periods that have experienced major changes in transportation technologies and/or political unification.     

质量随机的研发竞赛模型与最优奖励

假设研发质量具有随机性,建立了研发竞赛的非合作博弈模型,分别探讨了完全信息和不完全信息条件下竞赛参与人与竞赛发起者的最优策略。研究发现：竞赛参与人的研发投入水平在完全信息和不完全信息条件下都随自身研发效率的降低而降低;研发参与人的类型信息不完全程度越高,参与人的均衡研发投入越低;在每一种信息类型组合下都存在着最优奖励使得竞赛发起者的期望收益最大。