Cartel sustainability with vertical product differentiation: Price versus quantity competition

In the context of a vertically differentiated duopoly, we analyse the influence of the degree of differentiation on cartel sustainability, under both price and quantity competition. We find that, under both Bertrand and Cournot competition, the effect of vertical product differentiation on sustainability of the collusive equilibrium is unclear. It is shown that, given a degree of differentiation, price collusion is more sustainable than quantity collusion.     

大股东——管理者合谋影响因素的理论分析

公司大股东与管理者合谋程度主要受公司内部治理结构和公司外部治理环境两方面因素的影响。公司内部治理结构是适应于外部治理的一种内生性安排,外部治理环境是影响大股东与管理者合谋程度的因素。     

电信产业默契合谋的存在性与稳定性分析

合谋是产业组织理论研究的重要问题之一,它易出现于寡头垄断行业中。合谋的出现会降低消费者剩余,对整个社会福利造成损失,因此应当尽量去除。电信产业是一个典型的寡头垄断产业,电信运营商之间具有很强的相互依赖性,易出现合谋,特别是默契合谋。所谓默契合谋是指寡头垄断厂商以一种纯粹“非合作”的方式进行的合作。本文首先应用古诺模型对电信产业默契合谋的存在性进行理论分析,并举出实例予以佐证。在此基础上,从理论上进一步证明了电信产业默契合谋具有不稳定性,指出运营商之间的合谋是一个“囚徒困境”。进而应用冷酷策略,研究了电信产业默契合谋维持的激励条件,并从成本对称性、市场信息透明度、产品差异性、卖方集中度和技术进步程度等方面分析了影响电信产业默契合谋的相关因素。并指出现实中,默契合谋和价格竞争往往是交替出现的。     

Do Antitrust Laws Facilitate Collusion? Experimental Evidence on Costly Communication in Duopolies*

Bertrand supergames with non‐binding communication are used to study price formation and stability of collusive agreements on experimental duopoly markets. The experimental design consists of three treatments with different costs of communication: zero‐cost, low‐cost and high‐cost. Prices are found to be significantly higher when communication is costly. Moreover, costly communication decreases the number of messages, but more importantly, it enhances the stability of collusive agreements. McCutcheon (1997) presents an interesting application to antitrust policy by letting the cost of communication symbolize the presence of an antitrust law that prohibits firms from discussing prices. Although our experimental results do not support the mechanism of McCutcheon's (1997) argument, the findings point in the direction of her prediction that antitrust laws might work in the interest of firms.     

The Role of Monetary Policy in the New Keynesian Model: Evidence from Vietnam

This paper re-designs the New Keynesian model developed by Ireland (2004 Ireland, P. N. (2004). Technology shocks in the New Keynesian model. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 86(4), 923–936. doi: 10.1162/0034653043125158[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and then uses the Vietnamese data from January 1995 to December 2012 to estimate the model's parameters. The empirical results show that the State Bank of Vietnam had been more aggressive as well as more responsive to aggregate fluctuations in the period before August 2000 than in the latter period. Thus, this change in the policy stance could be a potential reason for the declining importance of monetary policy in generating movements in output growth, inflation, interest rate, and the output gap across the subsamples. Another notable finding is the dominant role of the cost-push shock in explaining fluctuations in inflation, interest rate, and the output gap, leading to a policy implication that more attention should be devoted to developing substitute and complement industries so as to mitigate negative effects of the cost-push shocks by reducing the degree of dependence on imports.     

云南周边国际环境的六大变化及其对云南的影响

云南周边国家通常指与云南相邻的缅甸、老挝和越南三国和相近的泰国、新加坡、柬埔寨、马来西亚、印尼、菲律宾、文莱、印度、巴基斯坦、孟加拉、尼泊尔、不丹、锡金和斯里兰卡14国.上述周边国家市场又可分为东南亚10国和南亚7国两大市场.这两大市场约18亿人口,其中东南亚约5亿人,南亚约13亿人,经济规模以GDP衡量达10600亿美元(其中东南亚约7300亿美元,南亚约3300亿美元).人口和GDP之和均超过中国(中国约12亿人口,GDP约9050亿美元),这两大市场至今仍是世界上开放度较低,但极具潜力的重要市场.     

The Evolution of Cooperation in Patent Races:Theory and Experimental Evidence

In a dynamic patent race model we analyze the formation and breakup of joint ventures in relation to: (a) the relative as well as absolute position of the firms in the race; (b) the degree of competition in the ex post market. Fudenberg et al. (1983) studied the main features of a patent race when firms compete in R&D, showing that firms in the same position compete fiercely, dissipating the rent from innovation. By contrast, we show that if firms can cooperate or compete in R&D, and if they start in the same position, they cooperate at the outset but break their agreement in the last stage if they will be serious competitors in the downstream market, while, if they can collude in the ex post market, they cooperate from the outset and they innovate jointly. When the firms are lagged by one step, cooperation does not take place, except in the case the value of the race is negative and the cost saving due to cooperation is large. However, cooperation never occurs if the leader is more than one step ahead. Finally, when the firms cooperate in R&D they proceed to the discovery at low speed. We test these conclusions via experiments on the incentive to cooperate during the course of a race. The results of a sample of 86 races support our theoretical conclusions, although the experimental findings are less clear-cut than the theoretical ones.     

The Impact of Green Building Labels on the Price of Housing: Evidence from China

This paper focuses on the willingness to pay for green housing in China. First, we introduce green building related labels in China and briefly discuss the consumers’ incentives to buy this kind of building. Second, with the available transaction data in Shanghai, a hedonic regression model is applied to investigate whether or not a price premium in the residential market exists. Furthermore, we use the nonparametric matching model under a treatment framework to see the robustness of our results. The empirical result shows there exists a significant price premium in China. However, the premium does not increase with quality certification tiers. That may imply that homebuyers in China are not sensitive to the differences among green buildings although they are willing to pay a higher price for this newly emerging energy-saving building. And we also give the explanation why this has happened.     

The Power of Parties: Evidence from Close Municipal Elections in Norway

We show that small shifts in representation can affect policy in proportional election systems. Using data from Norway, we find that a larger left‐wing party leads to more property taxation, higher childcare spending, and lower elderly care spending, while local public goods appear to be a non‐partisan issue. These effects are partly due to shifts in bloc majorities, and partly due to changes in the left–right position of the council, keeping the majority constant. The estimates on spending allocations are rather imprecise, but they are consistent with evidence on politicians' fiscal preferences and patterns in media attention.     

The Impacts of Land and Real Estate Price Fluctuations on Financial Stability: Evidence from China

We construct a provincial financial stability index, and use panel vector autoregression to construct a model for empirical testing. We find that local governments' reliance on land grant premiums amplifies the impact on financial stability. In addition, the relationship between the real estate market and the financial system allows real estate price fluctuations to significantly affect market participants, further impacting financial system stability. Finally, in the eastern region, land price fluctuations have a less adverse impact on financial stability, while in other regions, rising commodity real estate prices are the biggest threat to financial stability.     

政策可信性变动对菲利普斯曲线稳定性的影响——来自中国的经验证据

文章以1994年前后的价格冲击下人民银行将适应性政策转变为非适应性政策这一事件为背景,考察了公众对政策可信性的变动及其对通胀预期形成方式和菲利普斯曲线稳定性的影响。我们首先在理性预期假定下设定引入政策可信性变量的菲利普斯曲线模型。通过对"产出-物价"曲线的判断,SVAR模型中通胀冲击下通胀和产出缺口的响应函数以及菲利普斯曲线模型的递归最小二乘法检验,得出我国公众对政策的可信性增加,进而导致其通胀预期形成方式中的前向参照政策信息的成分增加,菲利普斯曲线发生改变。这就意味着,如果人民银行试图维持通胀预期形成方式和菲利普斯曲线的稳定,就应该保证政策可信性具有稳定性,而且,从长期实现价格稳定目标的角度来看,人民银行还应不断提高这一政策的可信性。     

巨灾经历对亲社会行为的影响:来自地震经历的经验证据

本文运用中国微观调查数据及中国地震灾害相关数据,研究了巨灾经历对个体亲社会行为的影响,并对可能的影响渠道进行了讨论.本文研究结果表明,经历过巨灾的个体,其亲社会行为会显著增加,且经过检验这一结果是稳健的.进一步的机制检验发现,巨灾经历可能通过政府信任、人际信任这两个渠道影响个体亲社会行为.本文证明了巨灾经历对亲社会行为可能的影响,并证明了灾害发生时政府救灾和社会救灾为社会带来的正外部性.     

The Behaviour of the Real Exchange Rate: Evidence from an Alternative Price Index

Although the long–run purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis is expected to hold across tradable goods, all price indices available to researchers for testing the validity of PPP contain some proportion of non–tradable goods prices, which may generate substantial persistence in the real exchange rate. We construct time series for quarterly price indices that minimize the presence of non–tradable goods for six major economies. Applying recently developed nonlinear econometric techniques to the resulting five US dollar real exchange rate series for the recent floating exchange rate regime, we provide evidence that the nonlinear mean reverting properties of these real exchange rate series are stronger than the mean reverting properties of real exchange rate time series constructed using the consumer price index (CPI). In turn, these results have a natural economic interpretation.
(J.E.L.: F31).     

The Monetary Transmission Mechanism: Evidence from Eight Economies in Transition

Abstract

We examine in this paper the importance of banks’ behavior in the transmission of the monetary policy to the real economy. Monthly data from eight economies in transition that recently became members of the European Union and the techniques of cointegration and Error Correction models are used, in order to investigate the relationship between intermediation margin spread (IMS, official lending rate minus deposit rate) and industrial production. Given the low development of corporate bond market and the dependence of non-financial agents on banking credits, we find that in many countries the IMS is an important leading indicator of industrial production. However, in countries characterized by credit access constraints (Estonia and Latvia) evidence for the traditional money channel is found. Evidence for both money and credit channels is found in Poland and Hungary. These results imply that a common monetary policy implemented by the European Central Bank may be transmitted in different ways across the new members of the enlarged European Union with different effects on real output in each country.     

The Case for International Coordination of Electricity Regulation: Evidence from the Measurement of Efficiency in South America

A decade of experience has shown that monitoring the performance of public and private monopolies is the hardest part of electricity sector reform in South America—because operators control most of the information needed for effective regulation. South American electricity regulators can reduce this information asymmetry by increasing international coordination and relying on comparative measures of efficiency. To make it possible for them to do so, countries should harmonize their regulatory databases and develop methodologies for making comparisons. This paper uses data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis to estimate the efficiency of South America's main electricity distribution companies. Both approaches allow regulators to use relatively simple tests to check the robustness of their findings, strengthening their positions at regulatory hearings.     

The impact of macroeconomic factors on income inequality: Evidence from the BRICS

In this paper we investigate how the evolution of income growth, real interest rates, and inflation have driven income inequality across a variety of countries with particular focus on the BRICS economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) during the period 2001 to 2015. Our work suggests that, when central banks of the BRICS economies use monetary policy for macroeconomic stabilization, they need to consider the impact monetary policy changes have on the distribution of income in their nations. Our estimates reveal that the unintended consequence of policies that induce economic growth and higher prices is higher income inequality. We find that the positive relationship between the three macroeconomic variables and income inequality for the BRICS economies is stronger during the post-2008 period.     

保险市场竞争程度与市场结构的关系研究

本文运用H统计量研究我国财寿险市场的竞争程度,并进一步通过回归分析与相关分析研究竞争程度与市场结构的交互影响因素.研究结果表明,1999-2006年间我国的财险市场可以判断为垄断竞争的市场结构,而同期我国寿险市场则属于寡头垄断的市场结构.2003年保险业费率市场化的改革对财险和寿险都有明显的影响,直接加剧了竞争程度.竞争度与财险市场公司数量正相关,与寿险市场公司数量负相关.竞争度与集中度的关系在财险业为负相关,而在寿险业根据采用不同的集中度指标的不同考察结果会有所不同.     

The influence of fiscal policy uncertainty on corporate total factor productivity: Evidence from Chinese public companies

This paper uses China's public companies to test the influence of fiscal policy uncertainty on corporate total factor productivity. The study finds that fiscal policy uncertainty has a negative impact on the total factor productivity, and the effect of conservative tax avoidance, a mediating variable between the two, is found more significant for non-state-owned and non-recession-stage enterprises. The study further finds that facing fiscal policy uncertainty, companies reduce R&D investment, which will deteriorate productivity. The overall results show that if the government maintains relatively stable fiscal policies, it will positively improve corporate total factor productivity, even in a longer period.     

The Tax‐smoothing Hypothesis: Evidence from Sweden, 1952–1999

This paper tests Barro's (1979) tax‐smoothing hypothesis using Swedish central government data for the period 1952–1999. According to the tax‐smoothing hypothesis, the government sets the budget surplus equal to expected changes in government expenditure. When expenditure is expected to increase, the government runs a budget surplus, and when expenditure is expected to fall, the government runs a budget deficit. The empirical evidence suggests that the model provides a useful benchmark and that tax‐smoothing behavior can explain about 60 percent of the variability in the Swedish central government budget surplus.