Academic content,research productivity,and tenure

This study examines the influence of a Finance doctoral program’s academic content on the research productivity of the graduates at the time of the tenure decision. The results of this investigation show that a Finance program’s academic content has no influence on the total number of publications of program graduates, but finds a significant relationship between academic content and graduate’s records of publications in top finance journals by the time of the tenure evaluation. More precisely, doctoral programs requiring more mathematically oriented classes such as Continuous Time Finance and/or Stochastic Calculus produce graduates who have a better record of publication in top finance journals at the time of tenure than those graduating from programs without these requirements.     

The Costs and Benefits of Long-Distance Entry: Regulation and Non-Price Discrimination

A primary goal of the 1996 Telecommunications Act isto encourage competition in long-distance telephonemarkets. Four years after passage of thislegislation, Bell Operating Companies (``BOCs') havebeen granted permission to offer long-distanceservices in only one state. The regulatory barrier toentry is justified on grounds that the BOCs have theability to discriminate against incumbentlong-distance carriers in the provision of essentialaccess services. We take this premise as given andquantify the critical level of discrimination requiredto offset the positive consumers' surplus gainsassociated with the enhanced competition resultingfrom BOC entry into long-distance markets.     

A new spread estimator

A cynosure of the academic literature relating to initial public offerings (IPOs) is the question of why they are “mispriced” so frequently. The large and growing literature addressing this question is evidence as to its intractability. This paper develops a theory of underwriters’ behavior suggesting that they will exploit their private information to minimize the bilateral risks to themselves of firm-commitment IPOs. That minimization may cause them to knowingly underprice the issue. The main result in this paper is based, in part, on the premise that the random character of the investors’ demand for shares in the secondary market, given the spread, is governed by an estimable conditional probability distribution. The underwriters exploit their private knowledge of that probability distribution to influence the number of shares in the offering in such a way as to minimize their expected loss function.     

GP PRACTICE BUDGETS: AN EVALUATION OF THE FINANCIAL RISKS AND REWARDS

This paper considers the progress to date of those GP practices which have decided to become fundholding practices. We note that already, within the first year of operation, both GP fundholders and District Health Authorities have developed a number of budget ploys. As part of our work we report on the findings of a pilot survey of GP budget holders in the Kent Family Health Service. We conclude that if budget holding becomes the normal pattern of general practice, there will need to be a considerable development of the financial skills and managerial capabilities of the practices and it may be time for the new GP practice manager to come of age.     

Identifying and characterising price leadership in British supermarkets

Price leadership is a concept that lacks precision. We propose a deliberately narrow, falsifiable, definition then develop it, illustrate its feasibility and test it using the two leading British supermarket chains. We find both firms engaging in leading prices upward over a range of products, with the larger being initially more dominant but the smaller increasing leadership activity to take overall leadership over time. However, more price leadership events are price reductions than price increases, consistently led by the smaller firm. Nevertheless, the increases are of larger monetary amounts than the falls, so average basket price increases over time.     

Core equivalence and welfare properties without divisible goods

We study an economy where all goods entering preferences or production processes are indivisible. Fiat money not entering consumers’ preferences is an additional perfectly divisible parameter. We establish a First and Second Welfare Theorem and a core equivalence result for the rationing equilibrium concept introduced in Florig and Rivera (2005a). The rationing equilibrium can be considered as a natural extension of the Walrasian notion when all goods are indivisible at the individual level but perfectly divisible at the level of the entire economy.     

Jack Goody. Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2004. vii + 200 pp. ISBN 0-7456-3190-8, $56.95 (cloth); 0-7456-3191-6, $21.95 (paper).

When and why did the West gain its current economic advantageover the rest of the world? This topic is the source of an animateddebate within the academy today. Jack Goody, a noted socialanthropologist, analyzes these questions and offers his ownviews in his new book, Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. The participants in this debate often have been divided intotwo broad camps. On the one side, which I will call here theEuropeanists, are those who     

Ungleichheit und sozialer Ausgleich in der erweiterten Europäischen Union

Das Europa der 27 ist ein Wirtschaftsraum mit extremen und stark untersch?tzten Einkommensunterschieden. Wie l?sst sich die Einkommensverteilung innerhalb der Europ?ischen Union messen? Welche Folgen hat die ungleiche Einkommensstruktur für den Arbeitsmarkt in der EU? Wie kann der soziale Ausgleich in Europa herbeigeführt werden? Dr. Michael Dauderst?dt, 60, ist Leiter der Abteilung Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.