Cournot competition,intra-industry trade,and nonconstancy of marginal costs: A three-country case

In this paper we shall develop and investigate a three-country and two-commodity model of international trade with an imperfectly competitive good which is produced under increasing marginal costs by explicitly incorporating intra-industry trade between industrialized countries. The main results we obtain are: (1) the full optimal discriminatory tariffs levied by a third importing country are necessarily positive; (2) the imposition of tariff can cause an increase in intra-industry trade, and therefore (3) under certain conditions the importing country's intervention into the international market can be a Pareto superior policy for the world as a whole as well as for the country.     

Market variance risk premiums in Japan for asset predictability

This article evaluates the predictive performance of variance risk premiums (VRPs) in Japan on the Nikkei 225 returns, credit spreads, and the composite index of coincident indicators. Different monthly VRPs, such as expected and ex-post VRPs, are measured by using model-free implied and realized variances from option prices and high-frequency (HF) data, and their predictive ability is compared with that of VRPs using a realized measure based on coarser frequency return observations. The empirical results show that the VRPs in Japan with HF data are useful in predicting credit spreads and the composite index of coincident indicators, but lose their predictive ability for the Nikkei 225 returns. Such significant predictive power tends to be greater for the expected VRPs with HF data relative to the ex-post VRP with HF data and VRPs with daily data as well as for lower investment grade credit spreads.