Demand,Information, and Competition: Why Do Food Prices Fall at Seasonal Demand Peaks?

Prices for seasonal food products fall at demand peaks. Price declines are not driven by falling agricultural input prices; indeed, farm to retail margins narrow sharply. I use electronic scanner data from a sample of US supermarkets to show that seasonal price declines are closely linked to market concentration, and are much larger in markets with several rivals than where a single brand dominates. Seasonal demand increases reduce the effective costs of informative advertising, and increased informative advertising by retailers and manufacturers in turn may allow for increased market information and greater price sensitivity on the part of buyers.     

Multi-Output, Nonfrontier Primal Measures of Capacity and Capacity Utilization

This article implements an econometric approach for generating primal capacity output and utilization measures for fisheries. In situations where regulatory, environmental, and resource conditions affect catch levels but are not independently identified in the data, frontier-based capacity models may interpret such impacts as production inefficiency. However, if such inefficiencies are unlikely to be eliminated, the implied potential output increases may be unrealistic. We develop a multi-output, multi-input stochastic transformation function framework that permits various assumptions about how output composition may change when operating at full capacity. We apply our model to catcher-processor vessels in the Alaskan pollock fishery.     

Customer evaluation of retail salespeople utilizing the SOCO scale: A replication,extension, and application

Measuring retail salesperson performance is a critical, though relatively neglected research issue. We suggest that the SOCO scale may be an appropriate tool for measuring salesperson performance from the buyer’s perspective. Therefore, a replication of the SOCO scale was undertaken by having consumers evaluate retail salespeople. The SOCO scale items were slightly modified to fit the consumer sample and retail focus of the study. In addition, the number of points on the SOCO response scale was also reduced and the verbal anchors modified to better suit the needs of telephone surveys. Despite these changes, the properties of the scale were found to be strikingly similar to those reported in prior studies. It was recommended that retailers adopt the SOCO scale to measure salesperson performance.     

Travellers under fire: Tourists in the Tibetan uprising

Following the demonstrations in Lhasa in the fall of 1987, tourists who witnessed the events became the principal source of information to journalists denied access to Tibet and gathered material on arrests, torture, and imprisonment for human-rights organizations. A loosely knit network that arose in the first few days following the demonstrations continued to function for more than 2 years, recruiting new volunteers to take the place of those who left. Using material collected as a participant-observer among individual travelers in Tibet during 1987 and 1988, the article examines the growth of this network in terms of the response of different travel cultures to political unrest.     

Anomalies and stock returns: Australian evidence

Prior research has identified the existence of several cross‐sectional patterns in equity returns, commonly referred to as effects. This paper tests for the existence of a number of well‐known effects using data from the Australian equities market. Specifically, we investigate the size effect, book‐to‐market effect, earnings‐to‐price effect, cashflow‐to‐price effect, leverage effect and the liquidity effect. An additional aim of this paper is to investigate the capability of the Fama–French model in explaining any observed effects. We document a size, book‐to‐market, earnings‐to‐price and cashflow‐to‐price effect but fail to find evidence of a leverage or liquidity effect. Although our findings indicate that the Fama–French model can partially explain some of the observed effects, we conclude that its performance is less than satisfactory in Australia.     

Exchange Rate or Wage Changes in International Adjustment？ Japan and China versus the United States

I. IntroductionSeldom have the pages of the financial press in Europe and America been so full of graveeditorializing on the need for a major depreciation of the dollar to correct the “unsustainable”current account and trade deficits of the United States. Much of this international moralizingdirects the high-growth East Asian countries to stop pegging their currencies to the dollar– or, in China’s case, to allow a large appreciation of the renminbi before moving to unrestrictedfloating.…     

On the asymptotic normality of Fourier flexible form estimates

Rates of increase in the number of parameters of a Fourier factor demand system that imply asymptotically normal elasticity estimates are characterized. This is the multivariate analog of work by Andrews (1991). Our proof strategy is new and consists of relating the minimum eigenvalue of the sample sum of squares and cross-products matrix to the minimum eigenvalue of the population matrix via a uniform strong law with rate that is established using results from the empirical processes literature. In its customary form, the minimum eigenvalue of the Fourier sum of squares and cross-products matrix, considered as a function of the number of parameters, decreases faster than any polynomial. The consequence is that the rate at which parameters may increase is slower than any fractional power of the sample size. In this case, we get the same rate as Andrews. When our results are applied to multivariate regressions with a minimum eigenvalue that is bounded or declines at a polynomial rate, the rate on the parameters is a fractional power of the sample size. In this case, our method of proof gives faster rates than Andrews. Andrews' results cover the heteroskedastic case, ours do not.