ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF RETAILER STORE BRAND PRESENCE ON MANUFACTURER BRANDS IN AN EQUILIBRIUM FRAMEWORK*

This article assesses the impact of retailer store brand products on manufacturer brand prices, profitability and consumer welfare in Boston's white fluid milk market. Estimates from a random coefficients logit demand model are used to specify and test a set of pricing games. Under the selected model, milk manufacturers are Stackelberg leaders to retailers, and store brand milks are procured by retailers at cost. The model is used to investigate counterfactual markets without retailer store brand milks. Counterfactual Simulation results indicate that store brands increase channel profits, retailer profits and consumer welfare, while having mixed effects on equilibrium retail prices.     

The Priority Structure of Corporate Liabilities

Most discussions of corporate capital structure effectively assume that all debt is the same. Yet debt differs by maturity, covenant restrictions, conversion rights, call provisions, and priority. Here, we examine priority structure across a sample of 4995 COMPUSTAT industrial firms from 1981 to 1991. We analyze the variation in the use of capital leases, secured debt, ordinary debt, subordinated debt, and preferred stock both as a fraction of the firm's market value and as a fraction of total fixed claims. Our evidence provides consistent support for contracting cost hypotheses, mixed support for tax hypotheses, and little support for the signaling hypothesis.     

Trade Openness and Exchange Rate Regimes

The paper evaluates the net welfare gains of inflation targeting over a fixed exchange rate as a function of a country's trade openness, using a multisectoral structural model calibrated to Chile. For most calibrations with separable preferences, net welfare gains are increasing in trade openness. The reason is that in more open economies terms of trade shocks, which favor inflation targeting, become quantitatively more important, while price markup shocks in the imperfectly competitive nontradables sector, which favor exchange rate targeting, become less important. The most important exception is heavily indebted countries, where net welfare gains are decreasing in trade openness.     

Issues in the Drive to Measure Liabilities at Fair Value

This paper compares the discussion on liability measurement in Accounting The0y Monograph 10 with the liability measurement requirements in recent international proposals on accounting for financial instruments. Rather than conducting a detailed review of the Monograph, the paper examines three major issues which wawant amplifjing, extending or criticising: What is “fair value”? Why fair value liabilities? Should fair value include an entity's own credit risk? The focus is on financial liabilities such as “plain vanilla” debt; other financial liabilities, such as insurance obligations, pensions, wawanties and environmental damage restoration involve additional considerations and are therefore not considered.     

An Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Rounding on the SPF Probabilities of Decline and Output Growth Histograms

I consider the possibility that respondents to the Survey of Professional Forecasters round their probability forecasts of the event that real output will decline in the future, as well as their reported output growth probability distributions. I make various plausible assumptions about respondents’ rounding practices, and show how these impinge upon the apparent mismatch between probability forecasts of a decline in output and the probabilities of this event implied by the annual output growth histograms. I find that rounding accounts for about a quarter of the inconsistent pairs of forecasts.     

Farmer Gone Fish'n? Swidden Decline and the Rise of Grouper Fishing on Palawan Island,the Philippines

Considerable research has focused on understanding how upland farmers adjust land‐based livelihoods to the influences of agrarian change in Southeast Asia. In the process, an ‘upland bias’ has emerged where researchers focus narrowly on the uplands as localities with distinct, coherent features, neglecting how families engage place, social relations and ethnicity as they access opportunities in proximate spaces. This paper considers how the Tagbanua – long considered an upland swidden people – have ‘stepped back’ from swidden agriculture due to declining yields and debt to harvest the lucrative grouper (e.g. Plectropomus leopardus). We show how Tagbanua families on Palawan Island have adjusted swidden as they negotiate social relations, ethnic cleavages and economic barriers to effectively engage the grouper industry. Rather than cast such farmers and fishers as ideal types in place, we argue that how they negotiate social relations creates new livelihood opportunities in varied environments, reinforcing the dynamic, recursive context of agrarian change.     

Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in India

This paper seeks to reconstruct David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) through an ethnography of a Special Economic Zone in Rajasthan, India. While Harvey sees ABD as an economic process of over‐accumulated capital finding new outlets, I argue that it is an extra‐economic process of coercive expropriation typically exercised by states to help capitalist overcome barriers to accumulation – in this case, the absence of fully capitalist rural land markets. In India's privately developed SEZs, the accumulation generated by this dispossession – which represents the disaccumulation of the peasantry – occurs through capitalist rentiers who develop rural land for mainly IT companies and luxury real estate, and profit from the appreciation of artificially cheap land acquired by the state. While such development has only minimally and precariously absorbed the labour of dispossessed farmers, it has generated a peculiar agrarian transformation through land speculation that has enlisted fractions of the rural elite into a chain of rentiership, drastically amplified existing class and caste inequalities, undermined food security and, surprisingly, fuelled non‐productive economic activity and pre‐capitalist forms of exploitation.