Buyer Alliances as Countervailing Power in WIC Infant-Formula Auctions

State agencies in infant-formula procurement auctions receive lower bids when they are in buyer alliances than when they are unallied. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) uses an auction to procure infant formula. Manufacturers bid on the right to be an agency’s sole supplier by offering a rebate on formula sold through WIC. Agencies frequently join together in buyer alliances. An empirical estimation shows that bids are lower to alliances and that lower prices result because alliances are heterogeneous. Results suggest that when heterogeneity is not controlled, bids decline with alliance size, which has policy implications because Congress recently limited alliance size.     

Learning from cost analyses: an illustration from the UK's New Deal for Disabled People (NDDP)

This article describes a cost analysis of an employment programme available to people claiming incapacity benefits in the UK. The NDDP was delivered locally by contracted providers called ‘job brokers’. The cost analysis found great variation among job brokers' costs and profitability, much of which seems attributable to differences in job broker size. The methods described here will be useful in evaluations wherever multiple institutions are contracted by governments to deliver services, especially when these institutions are involved in several different programmes.     

Good timing: The economics of optimal stopping

This paper presents an economic interpretation of the optimal “stopping” of perpetual project opportunities under both certainty and uncertainty. Prior to stopping, the expected rate of return from delay exceeds the rate of interest. The expected rate of return from delay is the sum of the expected rate of change in project value and the expected rate of change in the option premium associated with waiting. At stopping the expected rate of return from delay has fallen to the rate of interest. Viewing stopping in this way unifies the theoretical and practical insights of the theory of stopping under certainty and uncertainty.     

入美企业如何避开国家安全限制

2008年11月14日,美国财政部发布《2007年外国投资与国家安全法》（FINSA）的实施细则,此项法律旨在改革美国外国投资委员会（CFIUS）关于国外机构收购、兼并和接管美国企业国家安全审查体制。2008年12月,美国财政部发布了有关经过CFIUS审核认为存在国 家安全问题的交易类别指引，正式条例和相关指引传递的明确信息是，在个案基础上，CFIUS将保持其对外国投资交易进行国家安全审查的广泛自由裁量权。那么，美国这些法规的出台将会给我国企业以外资并购的方式进入美国市场带来怎样的影响？     

Should multivariate early warning systems for banking crises pool across regions?

Most extant work on prediction of banking crises has utilised global samples, which are in turn dominated by observations from middle-income countries, and rely on a single estimator. However, economic and financial structures as well as the pattern of shocks may differ substantially across regions, while a range of specifications is desirable to check robustness. Accordingly, in this paper we test the implicit pooling assumption in earlier multivariate work on Early Warning Systems using both logit and binary recursive tree specifications separately for crises in Asia and Latin America, as well as the pooled sample. Results suggest markedly different crisis determinants across regions, implying global samples are inappropriate.     

Multiple Buyers, Rent‐Defending and the Observed Social Costs of Monopoly

This paper uses analytical and experimental methods to assess the effects of fracturing the interests of agents seeking to maintain the competitive status quo in a rent‐seeking contest for a monopoly franchise. Theoretically, it is shown that while "rent‐defending" can ameliorate the social costs of rent‐seeking, these beneficial effects deteriorate quickly as the interests of those seeking to maintain the status quo become fractured. Experimental results indicate that overbidding is persistent when bidders have different sharing rules. In fact, the observed social costs of rent‐seeking often increase just when rent‐defending has the greatest predicted ameliorative effect.     

Demand under product differentiation: an empirical analysis of the US wine market*

Oversupply has led to a number of perplexities for the Australian wine industry in recent times. When disaggregated from the industry level, however, the problem can be better described as a range of attribute‐specific disequilibria. To date, the solutions to this problem have predominantly revolved around supply‐side policies of reducing output through crop thinning or vine pulling. By contrast, this paper focuses on the demand side and argues that the disequilibria may be reduced by gaining a better understanding of the demand for Australian wine. A discrete choice model of product differentiation is used to estimate the demand for wine in Australia's second largest export market, the United States. Implications of the analysis are explored.