Underpricing of Initial Public Offerings: The Case of Portugal

This paper analyzes the initial public offering (IPO) underpricing phenomenon in Portugal. We show that the ‘hot issue’ market of 1987, coinciding with a speculative bubble in the stock market, is well explained by investor sentiment theories and that the issuing firms seized a ‘window of opportunity’ provided by excessive demand to offer and list their shares. In IPOs prior to the 1987 crash, underpricing is very high while there is a strong reversion to fundamentals in the long run. In the period 1988–2004, we find lower IPO underpricing and overall no evidence of long-run underperformance of IPO firms. Bookbuilding IPOs are more underpriced than other price setting systems IPOs, and firms with seasoned public offerings show abnormal returns in the long run.

When should regions bid for artistic resources?

Under a variety of assumptions, subsidized bidding for creative resources fails to spur economic growth. First, under many conditions, the resource would find an optimal location in any case. Second, the bid may be good for a winning city's economy, but bad for the arts more generally. The bid winner is not necessarily the most appropriate home for the resource. Third, bids based on publicly available information are unlikely to beat the market price for attracting those resources. The key to stimulating growth, and drawing successful creative resources, is to stimulate the underlying microconditions for entrepreneurship, whether in the private or public sectors. Furthermore, we should make arts subsidies less location-specific.

Some regulatory lessons to be drawn from the financial crisis

The article briefly outlines how the two major structural causes of the financial crisis have been a massive underestimation of the negative externalities potentially arising from malfunctioning of financial markets, and the policy decision to assign the production of an eminently public good, financial stability, to private parties. Both ideas have been a tenet of the so-called Greenspan doctrine. The crisis also shows that all regulators tend to be captured in the end, and thus any new legislation should contain bright-line rules, that might look inefficient when assessed with reference to the market they regulate, but are socially efficient, because it would be politically costly to alter them. Criminal sanctions, which after all are a social form of regulation, should also be strengthened.

When and why do Austrian companies issue shares?

This paper examines the issuance of share capital via the Vienna Stock Exchange between 1985 and 2004. Evidence is supplied concerning the aggregate factors that help to explain the time-series variation in both the numbers of and proceeds from initial public offerings (IPOs) and seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). Results indicate that there is no cyclical sensitivity of issues, but that firms successfully time their offerings to take advantage of high stock market valuations and the associated low cost of equity capital. Corporate indebtedness and interest rates are significant determinants of SEOs in statistical and economic terms. The proceeds from IPOs, rather than funds raised by firms already listed, are used to finance subsequent investment.

GDP steady-state multipliers under monopolistic competition revisited

New Keynesian general-equilibrium static models showed the fiscal multiplier is an increasing function of the degree of monopoly. Here, I develop a simple intertemporal model allowing us to study the steady-state role of optimal capital stock (and depreciation) in the fiscal policy transmission mechanism. The GDP multiplier may be locally decreasing in the degree of monopoly when the number of firms is fixed, but results depend strongly on the set of parameter values chosen. Using a net-output definition or allowing for free entry leads to unambiguous dominance of the long-run monopolistic multiplier over the Walrasian one.

Should mobile capital pay for public infrastructure investment?

The paper contributes to the discussion of fiscal competition with infrastructure goods. We explicitly focus on the costs of providing public infrastructure capital that appear in the public budget as investment. Thus we analyse the problem in a dynamic framework. Public infrastructure is considered as a marginal product complement to private capital. A central result of the model is that the fact that public capital is a complement to private capital, so that an increase in the supply of public capital ceteris paribus improves the marginal productivity of private capital, cannot be used as an argument to support a source tax. The so-called indirect productivity effect on private capital induced by public inputs does not justify the taxation of mobile capital. Rather, the efficiency of a source tax on mobile capital income depends on the question of whether or not the public input generates a factor rent to private capital.

Econometric estimation of PCAIDS models

This paper presents a version of the proportionally calibrated almost ideal demand system (PCAIDS) model, useful for merger simulations, which can be econometrically estimated using price data for two firms in a market. PCAIDS is therefore seen as a set of restrictions to be imposed in an econometric estimation, and not only as a pure calibration method. The proposed model is applied to a database of the Argentine gasoline market, and its results are compared to the ones obtained with other alternative specifications.

Strategic technology choice in regulated markets with demand uncertainty

This paper presents a simple model of a non-competitive market with demand uncertainty in which firms can choose their technology of production. Technology is characterised by two parameters: capacity and flexibility. The first has a strong commitment value while flexibility is needed to face uncertainty. Lack of competition requires active regulation to ensure that the price is not set at excessive level. When choosing their technology, firms take into account not only the effects of this choice on the opponent(s) but also the effect on the regulated price. In this framework, and because of regulation, firms have an incentive to strategically manipulate their cost (cost padding). This causes monopoly regulation aiming at improving allocative efficiency to be ineffective. In fact, by “tying its hand” to a low level of capacity, the monopolistic firm is able to get round the constraint imposed by the regulator. Increasing the number of firms in the market may restore regulation effectiveness. The reason is that if demand is sufficiently volatile, then firms strategically choose flexible techniques and this effect dominates over the incentive to manipulate costs in order to escape regulation. In this case, regulation is effective precisely because cost padding is hampered by firms’ non-cooperative behaviour.

Intra-industry differences in vertical integration, heterogeneous costs and pricing: the case of web hosting

In many differentiated product industries, both traditional and “new economy” activities, vertically integrated firms also supply inputs to apparent rivals in the downstream business. This generates heterogeneity between low- and high-sunk cost suppliers with implications for entry and competitive conduct. The web hosting market is typical with primary suppliers operating alongside resellers who rent server space from them. We explore the impact of competition in US hosting using a unique dataset covering 15,000 packages offered by 3,500 firms. The results suggest price is sensitive to competitor clustering in quality space; an outcome consistent with easy entry for resellers with ultra-low fixed costs.

The disadvantage of entrants: did transition eliminate it? The case of the Russian footwear industry (1992–2000)

Several studies have analyzed entry in developed capitalist economies coming to the conclusion that entrants are usually smaller, less productive and at higher hazard than incumbents. This study considers if this was the case also in the rather peculiar situation of those firms which entered during the period of transition from planned to market economy, in one of the ex-soviet countries. Additionally this work considers whether or not the uncertain environment generated by transition did activate a process of entry, as situations of uncertainty are generally supposed to do. The main result of this paper is that despite the fact that incumbents were firms created and organized to meet the objectives of the soviet regime, they were not outperformed by subsequently-created firms which were formed to match the needs of a transitional/quasi market economy. These results do not support “vintage” and “liability of obsolescence” models which suggest that new comers are better fitted to match new conditions.

Competition and bargaining in vertical relationships with market uncertainty

We go through the decision to vertically integrate or its opposite, outsource, in an uncertain environment. We consider two different market strategies, price setting and quantity setting and two different vertical relationships: an (imperfectly) competitive one following Stackelberg mode and a more cooperative one with bargaining. In the first scenario, with certainty, price and quantity settings are alike, while with uncertainty the ranking changes. If a bargaining framework is adopted instead, quantity setting under uncertainty leads to an asymmetric distribution of realized gains along the vertical chain. Price setting turns out to be more equitable for firms and preferable even by consumers.

Financial Development and Income in North Africa

We explore the short-run dynamics and long-run relationship between income and financial development in Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco. We use co-integration and VECM models and four indicators of financial development. The empirical results indicate that there is a long-run relationship between income and each financial development indicator, except credit to the private sector in Algeria. On the other hand, Granger-causality test results indicate that the evidence on the direction of causality is mixed.

Recycling and extending product-life: an evolutionary modelling

This paper presents a model-based analysis of firms’ economic incentives to extend product life and market recyclable products. We address this problem by developing an evolutionary simulation model to describe the behavior of business firms as interacting with consumers and recyclers. Market structure, business firms’ R&D strategies and consumers’ preferences are found to have an important influence here. The simulation results show that improvement in recycling is necessary but not sufficient to solve the issue of increase in waste. Recycling will need to be backed up with an extension in product-life to face such an unwanted increase. Adopting such a strategy could be positive for firms and for the environment because it could lead to high economic performance, both in terms of profits and market share, and to high environmental performance, both in terms of product recyclability and product lifetime. Our results suggest introducing regulation policies aimed at encouraging firms to invest in developing green products, i.e. those which are easily recyclable and which have a long lifetime, and getting consumers to buy them. It would also seem crucial to lend support to innovation outlay for such firms and to favor their seeking to improve product performance.

Determinants of firm survival: a duration analysis using the generalized gamma distribution

We use parametric duration analysis to study the survival of Austrian firms. We find that hazard rates in both manufacturing and services initially increase, reach a peak after the first year of operation and then decrease with age. The maximum hazard rate is higher in services. We also find differences in hazard rates among different types of manufacturing industries distinguished by the nature of their sunk costs, their reliance on human resources and inputs from external services. Finally, we find that larger initial size and higher market growth, and at the same time lower net entry and declining market concentration prolong the life of an entrant.

Quantifying corruption by a human capital earnings equation

This paper uses a human capital earnings equation to quantify administrative corruption in the public sector. Regression analyses are conducted based on information from surveys administered to public officials in Albania. After accounting for officials’ characteristics, e.g., schooling, experience, gender, type of agency, and public and private sectors’ features, we deduce that the administrative corruption was on average 2.6× the officials’ current salary in Albania, which is equivalent to 16.7% of the country’s GDP.

The rise and fall of monopolistic competition revolution

The widespread idea among economists is that monopolistic or imperfect competition is a set of realistic models that were invented in the 1930s and their purpose was to fill the gap between the polar and, at the same time, hypothetical models of perfect competition and pure monopoly. The main argument of this paper is that the monopolistic competition revolution set in motion a reaction—partly driven by methodological considerations, partly ideological—that ultimately led to the restoration of perfect competition, as the benchmark for evaluating market outcomes. In the end, monopolistic competition eclipsed, and perfect competition from the fridges of economic analysis that was up until the 1920s was placed to the very core of microeconomic model-building.

Asymmetric Behaviour of Spanish Regional House Prices

In connection with the housing market, which is presently raising a great deal of concern among the general public, this paper investigates regional housing prices in Spain using variable co-integration techniques. It analyzes the asymmetric behavior in real house prices among the Spanish regions focusing on the study of the long-term relationships over time. This paper raises an important question of the national averages masking important regional asymmetries. Results indicate evidence of co-integration, which suggests a broad grouping of regions based on physical proximity or similar economic characteristics.

Transaction tax and stock market behavior: evidence from an emerging market

This study examines the impact of a stamp tax rate increase on market behavior, using data from two stock exchanges in China. We find that when the tax rate increases from 0.3 to 0.5% (which implies that the transaction cost increases by about 1/3) trading volume decreases by 1/3. This implies an elasticity of turnover with respect to a stamp tax of −50% and an elasticity of turnover with respect to transaction cost of −100%. The markets’ volatility significantly increases after the increase in the tax rate. Furthermore, the change in the volatility structure indicates that the markets become less efficient in the sense that shocks are less quickly assimilated in the markets.

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The distributional effects of selection and capital accumulation on firm productivity under imperfect capital markets

In this evolutionary model, random shocks create differences in the rate of return on capital, while individual saving and investment behavior can reduce these differences over time. Firms with either low total factor productivity (TFP) or a low average return on capital are selected for exit, and new firms enter to take their place. As would be expected, a higher turnover rate improves TFP and reduces its variation. While we show that a higher turnover rate would result in a more positively skewed TFP distribution if exit selection is based directly upon TFP, we find that when we select firms for exit based on their average product of capital, the marginal impact of a higher turnover rate is to more negatively skew the TFP distribution. Overall, our simulations highlight the importance of considering the role selection may play in shaping the distribution of productivity when econometricians seek estimates of firm inefficiency.

How large is liquidity risk in an automated auction market?

We introduce a new empirical methodology that models liquidity risk over short time periods for impatient traders who submit market orders. Using Value-at-Risk type measures, we quantify the liquidity risk premia for portfolios and individual stocks traded on the automated auction market Xetra. The specificity of our approach relies on the adequate econometric modelling of the potential price impact incurred by the liquidation of a portfolio. We study the sensitivity of liquidity risk towards portfolio size and traders' time horizon, and interpret its diurnal variation in the light of market microstructure theory.

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