Pricing congestion for arriving flights at Chicago O'Hare Airport

This paper estimates congestion fees for arriving flights at Chicago O'Hare Airport. The analysis finds that the level of congestion is only about a fifth of the magnitude of the congestion associated with departing flights. Congestion is much worse in poor weather conditions, and mitigating these weather delays is a primary objective of the current program to reconfigure the airfield. The analysis finds that the non-linearities inherent in models of congestion mean that even a very modest change in flight patterns reduces delays and congestion fees quite considerably.     

守正出奇的商业精神

导刊11月书香品读：地产领域中职业经理人队队排，家剧行业里连锁经销店团团转，职业经理人如何在纯正商业精神的照耀下引领中国企业，走向未来？连锁经销店如何在人本价值体系的构建中夯实品牌的常青基业？     

十载东篱情,一路你我心——直击当代东篱（澳洲）建筑景观机构十周年庆典

2009年12月17日,＂十载东篱情,一路你我心＂当代东篱（澳洲）建筑景观机构十周年庆典在广州星海音乐厅缤纷开幕。当代东篱作为一家见证中国景观行业十年发展历程的岭南实力派景观机构,庆典现场吸引了众多业界精英和地产名人前来庆贺,表演节目高潮迭出。这是东篱对客户表达感恩之心的一次献礼答谢,也是东篱藉十年社会影响力而成的一次精彩演绎。     

Food miles: Do UK consumers actually care?

The food miles concept, originating in the UK and given much prominence in the news media, has been used to imply that importing food from distant countries is inherently more wasteful than growing and consuming local produce. What impact is this potential non-tariff barrier having on consumer buying behaviour in UK supermarkets? Revealed preference surveys in four supermarkets show only 5.6% of 251 consumers nominated country-of-origin as one of the reasons for choosing a fresh food item they had just purchased. Furthermore, only 3.6% indicated that they had consciously chosen British products for the reason that such produce was “less harmful for the environment.” In contrast, stated preference surveys in the street found that 21.5% indicated that “food miles” or “the long distance it travels” would stop them buying New Zealand products. What people say may differ substantially from what they actually do in regard to “food miles.”     

Learning to export: Export growth and the destination decision of firms

I find evidence that the geographic expansion of firm exports occurs slowly over time and that a large share of export growth is due to incumbent exporters entering new destinations. New exporters enter large countries and destinations with characteristics similar to their domestic market. Less similar, distant or less developed countries are entered by firms already exporting to other destinations. I formulate a dynamic general equilibrium model to test if these patterns are due to firms learning how to export (as other recent empirical findings have suggested) or other factors considered in the literature. In this model, heterogeneous firms experience learning in the form of market entry costs that depend on export history. Using Russian firm level data, I find that learning plays a significant role in explaining the observed entry patterns, which standard trade models cannot account for.     

Large shareholders and the pressure to manage earnings

We present empirical evidence that firms inflate earnings around seasoned equity offerings in the presence of large outsider blockholdings, but not in their absence. The finding is robust to several alternative explanations, including differences in firm characteristics, growth, performance, CEO incentives, and capital usage. While we do not dispute that CEOs behave opportunistically, we challenge that earnings management is solely a symptom of weak governance. We conclude that strengthening shareholder power to alleviate the conflict between shareholders and management can also have the unintended consequence of intensifying the conflict between current and future shareholders.     

Comparing supply‐side specifications in models of global agriculture and the food system

This article compares the theoretical and functional specification of production in partial equilibrium (PE) and computable general equilibrium (CGE) models of the global agricultural and food system included in the AgMIP model comparison study. The two model families differ in their scope—partial versus economy‐wide—and in how they represent technology and the behavior of supply and demand in markets. The CGE models are “deep” structural models in that they explicitly solve the maximization problem of consumers and producers, assuming utility maximization and profit maximization with production/cost functions that include all factor inputs. The PE models divide into two groups on the supply side: (1) “shallow” structural models, which essentially specify area/yield supply functions with no explicit maximization behavior, and (2) “deep” structural models that provide a detailed activity‐analysis specification of technology and explicit optimizing behavior by producers. While the models vary in their specifications of technology, both within and between the PE and CGE families, we consider two stylized theoretical models to compare the behavior of crop yields and supply functions in CGE models with their behavior in shallow structural PE models. We find that the theoretical responsiveness of supply to changes in prices can be similar, depending on parameter choices that define the behavior of implicit supply functions over the domain of applicability defined by the common scenarios used in the AgMIP comparisons. In practice, however, the applied models are more complex and differ in their empirical sensitivity to variations in specification—comparability of results given parameter choices is an empirical question. To illustrate the issues, sensitivity analysis is done with one global CGE model, MAGNET, to indicate how the results vary with different specification of technical change, and how they compare with the results from PE models.     

A systems approach for the generation of new product ideas

One way to manage a creative project directed toward new product ideas is through a systems approach. This model offers a systematic way to explore all relevant factors, including those related to consumer satisfaction.     

Information Uncertainty and Post-Earnings-Announcement-Drift

Abstract:  We examine whether rational investor responses to information uncertainty (IU) explain properties of and returns to the post-earnings-announcement-drift (PEAD) trading anomaly. Consistent with a rational learning explanation, we find that: (1) unexpected earnings (UE) signals that are characterized as having greater IU have more muted initial market reactions; (2) extreme UE portfolios are characterized by securities with higher IU than non-extreme UE portfolios; and (3) within the extreme UE portfolios, high IU securities are more prevalent and earn larger abnormal returns than low IU securities. Further tests show that prior evidence of greater PEAD profitability for higher idiosyncratic volatility securities is explained by the greater information uncertainty associated with these securities.